Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

Jacob Sherman
An Ever Diverse Pair:
Owen Barfield, Teilhard de Chardin
and the Evolution of Consciousness

Chapter Four

Teilhard and the Problem of R.U.P.: The Residue of Unresolved Positivism

In any period of history, it is only a few so-called original minds…that go to the uncomfortable length of questioning what everyone is positive about. Yet history has shown more than once that what everyone is positive about may be a ghastly aberration.

–Owen Barfield, "Self and Reality"[1]

An error about creation results in an error about God.

 –Thomas Aquinas

The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

–Friedrich Nietzche[2]

Having surveyed the common milieu of evolutionary speculation shared by both Barfield and Teilhard and, subsequently, having sympathetically considered each author's system, it is time to look at Owen Barfield and Teilhard de Chardin together.  Although both Barfield and Teilhard speak of the evolution of consciousness, Barfield's thought, through the analysis of history and language, corrects and expands Teilhard's thought preparing the way for a fruitful synthesis.  This synthesis will be the focus of chapter five.  For now however, we must attend to Barfield's correction and expansion of Teilhard's thought. 

Barfield's thought is especially helpful in pointing out the unrecognized inconsistencies in many accepted modern attitudes.  Among the most profound of his insights is Barfield's identification of "R.U.P." (the residue of unresolved positivism) in modern thought in general and in Teilhard's thought in particular.

Those who are fortunate enough to discover the works of Owen Barfield often associate him initially with Teilhard de Chardin.[3]  After all, both authors dare to speak about that oft-ignored subject, the evolution of consciousness, and further, both do so from within a religious (Christian) framework.  Barfieldians soon realize, however, that the actual picture is not quite so simple.  Indeed, without ever substantially developing it, Barfield himself voiced significant reservations about Teilhard’s vision. 

According to Barfield, Teilhard suffers from R.U.P.: the residue of unresolved positivism.  This mental habit, which Barfield sees as a characteristic even of the most engaging and avant garde thinkers of the twentieth century (to say nothing of their far inferior imitators) consists of a subconscious allegiance to a consciously rejected materialism.  It occurs in those who think they have freed themselves intellectually from positivism, while at an unconscious level they remain bound.  The consequences of such mental imprisonment can be dire. 

It would be entirely misleading to suggest that Barfield thereby simply dismissed Teilhard.  More than once, Barfield points out that he uses Teilhard as an example of R.U.P. precisely because he has such respect for the Teilhardian vision.  When Barfield draws attention to his errors it is not to depreciate Pére Teilhard.  “Rather,” he says, “it is because, after all the adverse criticism, I remain impressed by the scope and ingenuity of his thought that I select him as a particularly striking example.”[4]

Throughout this chapter then, we will attempt to understand and develop Barfield’s critique of Teilhard.  Any reconciliation of their two unique and powerful visions must make its way through Barfield’s accusation of R.U.P..  Our approach will be threefold.  First, we will examine in greater detail precisely what Barfield means by R.U.P. and why he is so wary of it.  Second, we will examine how this cognitive dissonance (R.U.P.) shows itself in Teilhard’s work.  And finally, we will turn our attention to the effects this illusion has on Teilhard’s thought and opinions.  The ramifications are many, resulting in difficulties throughout Teilhard’s work.  Like Barfield however, my aim in voicing these criticisms is not to simply dismiss Teilhard but rather to salvage his vision, which remains, despite it all, uniquely potent and vital.

R.U.P.: the Residue of Unresolved Positivism

Positivism

Positivism first crops up as a description of an intellectual attitude in the writings of Henri, comte de Saint-Simon.  In his hands, positivism described the scientific method and its painstaking application to philosophy.  The term captured the imagination of Auguste Comte, who adopted the word and quickly made it his own.  He articulated a veritable positivist religion and, while his contemporaries rejected Comte’s rougher edges (no one really wanted to celebrate Leibniz Day during the month of Descartes), the power of his positivist philosophy dominated the Western world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In an overview of the thought-system, Niccola Abbagano names three “characteristic theses of positivism.”  The first, he says, is the unquestioning assumption that science is the only valid form of knowledge and, likewise, that facts are the only real objects of knowledge.  Second, he says that positivism carries with it the assertion that the philosophical method can not, if it is to be true, be any different from the scientific method.  They both necessarily function in a like manner.  Finally, positivism asserts that the purpose of philosophy is simply to identify what general principles are common to all the sciences and subsequently to use these principles as guides for human conduct and society.[5]  Abbagano concludes, “positivism, consequently, denies the existence or intelligibility of forces or substances that go beyond facts and the laws ascertained by science.  It opposes any kind of metaphysics and, in general, any procedure of investigation that is not reducible to scientific method.”[6]  

In the writings of Owen Barfield, positivism is always a derogatory term.[7]  In his eyes, "Positivism is the dogma that nothing really exists except what is actually or notionally perceptible by the senses. This is not very often explicitly affirmed nowadays, but it is almost everywhere implicitly assumed."[8]  Elsewhere, he elaborates:

Positivism is the philosophical statement of the position that there is an unbridgeable gulf between mental experience of the mental world on the one hand and the objective world, the outside world of nature on the other. That position was formulated finally and most clearly by Descartes.[9]

The core of positivism then, for Barfield, is simply the mind/body dichotomy and it carries with it a host of attendant angst and horror.   It is this dichotomy, this isolation from ourselves and indeed, from our world, that has given rise to the modern experience of nausea, to our sense of alienation, even to our own neuroses including our proclivity towards the despoliation of the earth, her forests, her oceans and her species.  This mind/body-world tear in the fabric of felt reality has led to the pillaging of forests and the overcrowding of mental asylums.  No one articulated the horrors of life in the positivist universe better than the poets of angst and the existential philosophers of the twentieth century.  What keeps Barfield however, from becoming one of these prophets of angst—that is, what keeps him from shaking his fist defiantly at the cold, cruel universe or grasping his head in a Munch-like scream—is that Barfield sees the “common sense” assumptions of positivism as themselves wrong.  He acknowledges that the universe may feel cruel, cold and apathetic, but Barfield’s optimism lies in the conviction that this frigid universe is itself illusory.  It is a figment of our collective, positivist imaginations.  Positivism is to be doubly blamed: first, for the havoc it wreaks on society and the individual; second, because this havoc is based wholly on an untenable, intellectual illusion.

All of this is supported by the adamantine reasoning of Barfield’s mind.  His attacks on positivism are vitriolic and passionate, but never without substance.  As we saw last chapter, he had a deeply held, clear and systematic objection to the fundamental tenants of materialism.  Barfield may have been a romantic, but his was a romanticism of the highest intellectual caliber.[10] 

Unresolved Positivism

Positivism, though still a societal force, must eventually fall under the weight of its own inconsistencies and, not least, the hostility of the system towards human needs and life.  It is simply an inhospitable system, a worldview under which humans cannot long live, and it has come under increasing scrutiny over the last century.  Barfield however, is not particularly impressed with many of positivism's detractors.  Rather than freeing themselves from the oppressive and false dualisms of mind and body or mind and world, many of these critics continue to imaginatively assent to the old beliefs, while in theory rejecting them.

Barfield calls this U.P., unresolved positivism.  In an interview with Shirley Sugerman, he explains:

Unresolved positivism occurs when that conviction, that imagination, that way of looking at mind and body remains in fact in a 's mind even though he may have in philosophical theory rejected or it. For instance, someone like--well any of the subjective idealist philosophers of the nineteenth century. They wrote books which showed that unbridgeable gulf was not really unbridgeable because it wasn't there. Nevertheless in other things they said, when they were referring to science or any particular subject matter other than philosophy, they would assume it was there.[11]

Barfield's concern in delineating this is that one recognize the cultural power of positivist philosophy.  The tenets of positivism are inculcated deep within all westerners because these tenets form the unconscious assumptions of the whole society.     Beginning with one's first exposure to this society (usually in the family) and continuing throughout one's life, these tenets are programmed over and over into the individual.  Barfield emphasizes that it is exceedingly difficult to free oneself from such an inherited way of thinking, or rather, imagining, since U.P. takes place in that juncture before rational thought comes into play.  Unresolved positivism remains in so many because, for them, it goes under the nomenclature of common sense.[12]  It takes great power of mind and imagination to free oneself from this unresolved positivism.

R.U.P.: the Residue of Unresolved Positivism

Even great minds and imaginations however, find it difficult to break completely free.  To P. and U.P., therefore, Barfield adds a third and final stage: R.U.P., the residue of unresolved positivism.  As he tells Shirley Sugerman:

Then there's the residue of unresolved positivism, which is what you get in people who think they've realized there's such a thing as unresolved positivism. People like Jung, I'm referring to, I think, here. Who nevertheless themselves, when it comes to the crunch as it were, when the chips are down, you find thinking of things like mind, or the unconscious mind, as something that is enclosed in a specific physical body. They're not thinking of it as something which transcends the separateness of an individual human being's physical body.[13]

He explains elsewhere, "RUP (Residue of Unresolved resolved Positivism) denotes the persistence of inherited Positivism in the subconscious after even the imagination has rejected it, or claims to have rejected it."[14]

The residue of unresolved positivism occurs in those brave few who have overcome positivism intellectually and imaginatively but remain experientially (at the subconscious level) within the positivist world.  To illustrate this, Barfield draws attention most frequently Carl Jung and the whole school of Jungian psychology.  On the one hand, he says, Jung's notion of the collective unconscious appears and claims to have at last bridged the mind-body gap.  And to be sure, Jungian discourse has opened wide areas of investigation (synchronicity, archetypal psychology, whole realms of mythology and religious symbolism) flatly rejected in Cartesian/positivist systems.  Upon closer examination however, one finds the old mind/body dualism still operative, just hidden a bit more this time around.  Barfield comments, "It seems to me I found that all of these people who were writing idealistically or Jungian-ly about the relation between mind and body, although they were ostensibly overcoming the gulf, were really thinking in terms of it at the bottoms of their imaginations."[15]  Jung and his followers continue, it seems, to think of consciousness as contingent on the presence of a sentient physical organism endowed with life.[16]  For them, as for the rest of the West, the assumption seems to be: no organism, no consciousness.[17]  This is illustrated simply by the great Jungian insight regarding the collective unconscious: Barfield points out that even the language used implicitly assumes a mind/body dualism.  He writes, "I think the word 'collective', in his term the 'Collective Unconscious' points to its supposed origin in a numerable aggregate of… physical organisms."[18] 

To free oneself from this slavish devotion to residual positivism, one must be willing no longer to think of the mind–your mind, my mind, any mind–as somehow contained or partitioned by the body.  Rather, the mind must be understood non-locally.  Mind, Logos, Christos, is something beyond ourselves that we participate in and from which we emerge.  It is the matrix out of which "individual minds" coalesce. 

This is a difficult concept to grasp, for the residue of unresolved positivism must be combated by something more than the intellect, more even than the imagination–to overcome R.U.P. one must leap experientially into a world wherein the mind/body or mind/world dichotomy is no more.  As Barfield describes it,  "[If one has no residue of unresolved positivism, one understands experientially that mankind has arisen in mind and body out of an unconscious matrix]. . .  One experientially understands it, and therefore one doesn't forget it when one starts to talk about other things."[19] 

Residual Positivism in Teilhard's Thought

As we noted above, Barfield had a quite significant admiration for the work of Teilhard de Chardin.   Certainly, Barfield was impressed enough to include The Phenomenon of Man in a very select list of thirteen works (including also Berdyaev, Eliade, and Guenon) recommended to those wishing to study the evolution of consciousness further.  At the same time however, Barfield never hid his reticence regarding areas of Teilhard's thought and frequently suggested Teilhard as an example of a great and courageous mind still subject to the residue of unresolved positivism.  Recall that the residue of unresolved positivism reveals itself primarily in the persistence of the notion of an unbridgeable gulf between the mental world and the material world.  Therefore, as we try to understand Barfield's criticism of Teilhard we ought to search for just such a persistence in the thought of the Jesuit paleontologist. 

Indeed, upon close examination such a mind/body-world gap does reveal itself in Teilhard's thought. Brilliant as it is, Teilhard's system is what Barfield calls camera-consciousness.  Like a camera, he is always looking at but never into what he is seeing.[20] Unlike the phenomenology of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, Teilhard's phenomenology never describes consciousness from the inside (that is, the subject's experience of consciousness).[21]  Eschewing the formers' analysis of subjectivity, Teilhard equates his phenomenology with the scientific–presumably objective–point of view.[22]   His analysis of consciousness relies almost entirely on external indicators (e.g., skull size or technological artifacts).[23]   This leads N. M Wildiers to say that Teilhard's observation of consciousness is always an observation from the outside.  He writes:

Whereas the contemporary phenomenologists incarcerate themselves, so to speak, in the study of the interiority, Teilhard's reflections merely bring him to the point of that interiority without seeking to penetrate further into it (emphasis mine)… Teilhard's cosmic phenomenology leads ultimately to a very marked accentuation of "interiority", although without much attempt to examine this in its inner structure.[24] 

All of which leads Teilhard necessarily to a privileging of the external world to the expense of the inner realms.  This is, of course, a bow to the positivism Teilhard has often lambasted and a perpetuation of the mind/body disjunction.  Teilhard's stated intention, to describe the whole phenomenon of the universe, is therefore inadequate from the very beginning.[25]  He himself declares the importance of attending to this interiority as a fundamental part of the universe, but he remains methodologically unable to give it voice!  The best he can do is to infer its presence though it should be obvious that sheer inference based on measurable externals (like our cranial capacity) is able to tell one next to nothing about our own deep selves and our experience of the world–that is to say, our consciousness.  True, by acknowledging the presence of interiority he has included far more than most in this positivist age, but without a means to overcome camera-consciousness his vast project must remain significantly incomplete.

This residue of unresolved positivism shows itself even in the structure of Teilhard's magnum opus, The Phenomenon of Man.  The book's divisions correspond to the three major periods Teilhard discerns in the history of the universe: those of Matter, Life and Thought.  Such a three-fold division, Barfield notes, would be impossible if Teilhard would "look back into the past, as well as looking back onto it…"[26]  Were he to do so, Teilhard would have recognized the need a for a fourth stage (or, at least, a transition) inserted between the periods of Life and Thought: namely, Language.  As Barfield notes:

There is scarcely any reference at all to language in The Phenomenon of Man; certainly not at the all-important point where it belongs, which is the point of transition from his second to his third period–from passive life (subjectively passive life) to active thought.[27] 

Barfield adds, "… in excluding [language, Teilhard] renounces all possibility of any understanding of the prehistoric phase in the evolution of consciousness."[28]

This is quite a claim for pre-history occupies nearly half of The Phenomenon of Man.  What is it that Barfield finds so disagreeable in Teilhard's conception of pre-history?  To begin with, Barfield insists that Teilhard "pays firm allegiance"[29] to the axiom–a "basic assumption" of modern minds–that the world was initially "a world of subjectless objects."[30].   Barfield himself has argued extensively that such a view of a subjectless universe is both philosophically and philologically untenable.  Whether one is studying philosophy, cognitive psychology, quantum physics or philology, one is forced to recognize the absolute necessity of consciousness (the inner world, the world of the observer) at every stage of the game.  As Barfield, highlighting the contribution of language, puts it:

The reciprocal relationship between [the inner and outer worlds], which language reveals, will not allow of one's ever having existed without the other.  It points back instead to a common origin.  The distinction between inner and outer, which seems so fundamental to us, will be seen to have been brought about by man himself in the very process of exercising the symbolizing faculty which gave him his language.[31] 

Now, unlike most contemporary thinkers, Teilhard does postulate an initial, miniscule glimmer of consciousness (or radial energy) from the very get-go.  As he put it, "in one degree or another, this 'interior' [obtrudes] itself as existing everywhere in nature from all time."[32]  However, for Teilhard this interior exists at "the heart of beings", it is something that from the beginning has existed within individual centers.  He, like nearly all who suffer from R.U.P., "[does] not really believe that man's consciousness ever was a part of nature's any more than it is now."[33]  This assumption can be seen in Teilhard's maxim, that in every region of space and time, "co-extensive with their Without, there is a Within to things."[34]  This leads Teilhard to postulate a world of vastly atomized, miniscule subjects at the dawn of creation:

Considered in its pre-vital state [that is, pre-history], the within of things, whose reality even in the nascent forms of mater we have just admitted, must not be thought of as forming a continuous film, but as assuming the same granulation as matter itself…Atomicity is a common property of the Within and the Without of things.[35]

One might of course ask how, without any ability to look within consciousness, Teilhard could speak so confidently about its atomicity.  This is the same problem that we noted earlier in Jung: the proclivity to conceive of pre-history as populated by aggregates of individual, skin-or-matter-encapsulated centers of consciousness.  Viewed only from its externals this might make sense, but it is entirely at odds with the testimony of the inner world itself.  The evidence provided by language, for example, (as Barfield has shown in nearly every one of his works) points explicitly to a development of consciousness that begins as anything but atomistic. 

[We must] accept what the whole character and history of language cries aloud to us… [that] subjectivity is never something that was developed out of nothing [or almost nothing, a la Teilhard] at some point [atomism] in space, but is a form of consciousness that has contracted from the periphery into individual centers.[36]

The history of language points towards an initial immersion in a clear lake of meaning,[37] a matrix of super-individual consciousness within which the physical world from its inception has dwelt, and from which it emerged.

Trapped in his residual positivism, Teilhard was unable to reach such a conclusion nor even to avail himself of the tools (e.g., the study of language or mythology) that might have lead him to such an understanding. 

This failure on Teilhard's part resulted in numerous aberrations, many with very practical consequences.  It is to those consequences that we now turn our attention. 

The Consequences of R.U.P.

Thomas Aquinas declares that a mistake about creation results in a mistake about God.[38]  And a mistake about the Ultimate, one might add, affects everything.  Interdisciplinary and integrative thinkers like Barfield, Teilhard or Aquinas seem to make clear that not only is there an ecology of life but that there is an ecology of thought, as well.  To the extent that it has integrity, thinking is a vast web of inter-locking matrices and inter-dependant thoughts, one always tugging, shaping, informing or enlivening the other like the rhythms of biological life itself.  That being said, it should come as no great surprise that Teilhard's residue of unresolved positivism should issue in a host of problems within his great system.

Of course, any system (Barfield's included) is subject to correction at points along the way.  When looking at Teilhard's thought then, the errors with which we will be concerned are only those directly traceable to Teilhard's one great structural error (R.U.P.) and whose significance is plain.  Three such errors are readily discernible.

Noosphere or Neurosisphere?

Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (post-dated 1900) appeared like an omen at the beginning of the twentieth century.  In retrospect–aware of the depth of the twentieth century's psychological trauma, the energy spent in psychiatric study, the captivation of the popular imagination by Freud, Jung and their followers–it is tempting to consider this publication more than a bit propitious.  To be sure, there has never been a century so gripped by psychic trauma and dis-ease.  Of course, that only begs the question, Why?

Like any great mind of the last century, Teilhard was aware of this trauma.  He writes:

Conscious or not, anguish–a fundamental anguish of being–despite our smiles, strikes in the depths of all our hearts and is the undertone of all our conversations… Something threatens us, something is more than ever lacking, but without our being able to say exactly what.[39] 

He continues to probe however, and suggests a reason:

The whole psychology of modern disquiet is linked with the sudden confrontation with space-time…Under the influence of reflection undergoing socialization, the men of today are particularly uneasy, more so than at any other moment of history.[40] 

According to Teilhard, then, the whole sense of modern disquiet is seen as stemming from modernity's confrontation with the frightening immensities of space-time.  His remarks meet with an intuitive recognition in most readers as he describes "the enormity of space and time."

Which of us has ever in his life really had the courage to look squarely at and try to 'live' a universe formed of galaxies whose distance apart runs into hundreds of thousands of light years? …The effort of trying to conscientiously to find our proper place among a thousand million men.  Or merely in a crowd.[41] 

Indeed, Teilhard has identified and explicated the problem well.  The problem arises however, when Teilhard turns his considerable powers towards the procuring of a solution.  He suggests that the crushing enormities of space-time might be humanized "as soon as a definite movement appears which gives them a physiognomy."[42]  For Teilhard this means that once one recognizes the character of space-time, that this grand production is leading towards the emergence of Humanity and the noosphere, the universe itself becomes benign, even comforting.  Teilhard's solution to the existential problem is to give to humanity its dignity through an evolutionary scheme.  No longer the center of a pre-Copernican universe, humanity becomes central in the schema of time, Homo sapiens seen now as the leading arrow of evolution.

This seemingly genteel solution, however, reveals itself to be steeped in error, an error facilitated by Teilhard's R.U.P.  Teilhard recognizes that the magnitude of the existential problem is peculiar to the modern era but he fails to understand why.  Specifically, Teilhard has failed to recognize the complicity of the noosphere in the modern plight.  Apparently, as far as he is concerned, the level of our contemporary angst is attributable simply to our greater knowledge.  The ancients didn't experience these fears because they hadn't realized how frightening the universe was.  And furthermore, Teilhard's solution is more knowledge, more information–acquiring an understanding of humanity's place of privilege in the evolutionary scheme.

What Teilhard has entirely overlooked is that our felt separation from the universe is not so much due to our knowledge regarding the immensities of space-time, but the severance of our feeling from the surrounding world.   It is the cold world of idolatry (the narcissistic denial of participation) that hollows caverns in human souls.  Moreover, the rise of this idolatry has coincided with the very deployment of the noosphere.

Theodore Roszak suggests that we at least consider that, "With mankind, we may move beyond the noosphere into what might better be called the 'neurosisphere': the realm of psychiatric disease."[43]  This is a sentiment that resonates with much of Barfield but is entirely absent from Teilhardian thought.  For Peré Teilhard, noogenesis is the consummate triumph of evolution.  In his thought, progress is equated with evolution and is only ever seen as a unidirectional ascent towards ever-expanded consciousness.  It is useful to recall here that such a concept of progress was first popularized by Auguste Comte and the formal school of Positivism.

Contrast this with Barfield who sees evolution as more of a "U" than a unidirectional arrow.  For Barfield, it is the wresting of self-consciousness away from a primal matrix of super-individual consciousness.  Having won our selves, our identities as individuals, we now carry that personality back with us as we re-participate in that from which we came and within which we dwell.   In keeping with these differences, Barfield's solution to angst is the fully self-conscious re-integration with the participatory universe.  Teilhard's solution, on the other hand, is just more noogenesis–progress, progress, progress.   The problem is that such a conception of progress is what started the problem in the first place. To suggest that all one needs do is to project and extend the activities of the last four centuries (noogenesis) indefinitely into the future is absolutely absurd and will only serve to condemn the world to an increase in human deviation and devastation.

Because Teilhard sees evolution as a unidirectional ascent of mind he is prevented from noticing the pitfalls and pathologies of noogenesis. To quote Roszak again, "Teilhard's treatment of mind…leaves out whole levels of pathological deviation at the human level."[44]  He gives to noogenesis an a priori imprimatur.   How else can one explain the apparent delight with which Teilhard recounts, "The sudden deluge of cerebralisation, this biological invasion of a new animal type which gradually eliminates or subjects all forms of life that are not human, this irresistible tide of fields and factories…"[45]? This must be recognized as the language–indeed, the rhetoric–of the neurosisphere and it permeates Teilhard's writings.

Rosemary Radford Ruether has such rhetoric in mind when she questions Teilhard's "sanguine acceptance of extinction of species as the acceptable price of progress."[46]  Likewise, Jurgen Moltmann notes that, "in his firm faith in progress Teilhard does seem to have overlooked the ambiguity of evolution itself, and therefore to have paid no attention to evolution's victims."[47]  The rhetoric of the neurosisphere is fraught with victims and catastrophes.  It justifies its anthropocentrism through an appeal to evolution as a unidirectional event.[48]  Here are all the horrors of unrestrained Calvinism restated in biological dress as certain species are (s)elected to privilege and survival while others are selected for destruction.  These are the victims for whom Moltmann is concerned and towards whom Teilhard seems oblivious.  This picture of a "biological execution of the Last Judgment on the weak, the sick and 'the unfit'"[49] is something to recoil at, a neurosispheric horror.  But Teilhard does not recoil and instead we find in him the arrogance and impassivity of a conqueror over the conquered.  He writes triumphantly of a technologically empowered mankind "better equipped for conquest… [flinging] its final waves in the assault on those positions [in the natural world] which had not yet fallen to it."[50]  He declares that, "the spirit of research and conquest is the permanent soul of evolution."[51]

As is always the case, the victor justifies his violent conquest through an appeal to superiority.  The reason to laud this onslaught of humanity is because human beings have climbed farther up the psychic ladder. Listen, for example, to Teilhard's derogatory dismissal of insects:

We cannot but wonder when we see living around us this world so marvelously adjusted and yet so terribly far away?  Our rivals?  Our successors, perhaps?  Must we not rather say a multitude pathetically involved and struggling in a blind alley?[52]

Why judge these creatures as pathetic and full of futile struggle?  Because they are psychically inferior and incapable of rising to the level of noogenesis. [53]  They cannot, that is, think like humans. 

Adopting this sort of a patronizing tone about insects is one thing, but when the same tendency reveals itself in discourse about other human beings there can be no doubt that one is in the realm of the neurosisphere.  Teilhard's dismissal of psychic inferiority spread even to his evaluation of other races and cultures.  His racial biases are subdued but reveal themselves from time to time in his language.[54]  Far more pronounced however, is his blatant dismissal of other non-Western cultures.  He writes for example of China and India:

Well into the nineteenth century [China] was still Neolithic, not rejuvenated, as elsewhere, but simply interminably complicated in on itself, not merely continuing on the same lines, but remaining on the same level, as though unable to lift itself above the soil where it was formed.

And while China, already encrusted in its soil, multiplied its gropings and discoveries without ever taking the trouble to build up a science of physics, India allowed itself to be drawn into metaphysics, only to become lost there… With their excessive passivity and detachment, they were incapable of building the world.[55]

It must be admitted here that Teilhard spoke out strongly against racially devised totalitarianism.  He called the vision of one race triumphant over the others "false and against nature."  He emphasized that his vision of evolution, the emergence of the super-human, must not only be open to "a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others…[but only] to an advance of all together…"[56]  But of what does this all-together advance consist?  Teilhard is explicit.  It consists in the Westernizing of the whole world.  Teilhard envisions no one left behind so long as they conform to image and standard of modern Europe.  He writes:

[It is in the West] that all that goes to make man today has been discovered, or at any rate must have been rediscovered.  For even that which had long been known elsewhere only took on its definitive human value in becoming incorporated in the system of European ideas and activities.  It is not in any way naïve to hail as a great event the discovery by Columbus of America…[57] 

He could hardly have been clearer–to become or remain fully human all peoples must conform to the standards and ways of Europe.  Despite Teilhard's protests otherwise, Ruether wonders, "Does this not imply an acceptance of ethnocidal destruction of other peoples [at least, those who won't incorporate] and cultures as also to be tossed aside by the triumphal march of Eurocentric progress?"[58]

Reflecting on Teilhard's thoughts regarding the diversity of cultures and species one is led to wonder: if this sort of pathological contempt for difference is any mark of hominisation then perhaps it is we humans, and not the insects, struggling pathetically in a blind alley.

Technos or Telos?

Teilhard's residue of unresolved positivism blinded him not only to the problem of the neurosisphere but led him down some other dark alleys as well.  Among these we must certainly consider Teilhard's treatment of technology.  Technology holds a central place within Teilhard's thought, his method forcing him to use technology (coupled with biological evidences like cranium size) as the indicator of evolution, even the evolution of consciousness.  This methodology combined with Teilhard's unidirectional understanding of evolution to force him into a logical corner wherein every appraisal of technology must be thoroughly positive.  This judgment is never stated outright but is implicit throughout his work.  Without being able to look inside consciousness then, and to gauge it from that viewpoint, Teilhard ends up confusing the production of tools and machines with the attainment of fuller consciousness, which is to say, he falls into the positivistic error of equating technos with telos.  

This error is plainly obvious in Teilhard's followers who are prone to extremes that sometimes boggle the imagination.  The Internet has became the prime vehicle for the dissemination of such neo-Teilhardian propaganda.  The keywords Teilhard and Internet bring up a host of pseudo-apocalyptic writings about the technosphere, the eclipse of humanity by Artificial Intelligence, or more often, the golden age of technological connectivity being ushered in by new wired realities.  One of the most disseminated of these writings is Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg's Wired article, "A Globe Clothing Itself With a Brain".[59]  Copied and posted throughout cyberspace, Kreisberg's article argues that, "Teilhard saw the Net coming more than a half century before it arrived," and awaits the day when the Net will ultimately coalesce into a single planetary mind.  Like so many of Teilhard's Net denizens, Kreisberg points to Artificial Intilligence, "virtual life", as the energy of evolution struggling to break out of organic life into new life forms.  The point to be made here is that technological advance is being summarily confused with teleological purpose.  The Net is lauded with messianic fervor while A.I. lies just over the horizon, a glorious Parousia to be anticipated with baited breath.

It is, of course, unfair to judge a leader by his followers.  Jung was not a Jungian, Christ not a Christian, and Teilhard was certainly not one of his wired, Gen-X admirers.  Nevertheless, the confusion of technos with telos is present throughout Teilhard's own work as well.  Teilhard's enthusiasm and excitement spill over as he speaks of "life taking a step, and a decisive step," in our age: "the age of industry; the age of oil, electricity and the atom; the age of the machine, of huge collectivities and of science…"[60]  He marvels uncritically at the "irresistible tide of fields and factories."[61]  Certainly, there is something amiss here!  Certainly, there must be some concern for what is lost, for the deforestation and desertification of the planet, for species vanished never to be recovered, for the dehumanizing consequences of industrialization, the destruction of cultural traditions, rituals, myths and character.  It is true that, in Teilhard's time, the modern environmental movement had yet to come about and public awareness of these issues remained low, but that is hardly an excuse.  One need only mention the names of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, or Leopold to remind us that environmental concerns and technological criticisms existed long before Rachel Carson and Marshall McLuhan.  Bound by his positivism however, Teilhard seemed blissfully ignorant of these possibilities.

One of these areas within Teilhard's thought that is currently forcing itself to the fore of public debate is the issue of eugenics.  Francis Collins' and Craig Venter's much celebrated completion of the "first draft" of the humane genome nucleotide sequence has brought the issue of genetic manipulation crashing back into the public sphere.  It is an issue about which Teilhard is eager to share.  He rushes headlong into the eugenic dream without the slightest sign of restraint.  He writes, "So far we have certainly allowed our race to develop at random, and we have given too little thought to the question of what medical and moral factors must replace the crude forces of natural selection should we suppress them."[62]  As he makes clear, he does not think we shall be silent on this issue much longer.  Indeed, the genetic, bio-technical manipulation of the human race must soon commence:

We shall soon be able to control the mechanisms of organic heredity.  And with the synthesis of albuminoids imminent, we may well one day be capable of producing what the earth, left to itself, seems no longer able to produce: a new wave of organisms, an artificially provoked neo-life…[63] 

My aim is neither to decry eugenics nor to support it, but merely to demonstrate the carte blanche approval with which Teilhard approaches the subject.  There is no indication of moral and ethical wrestling here, no questioning of the eugenic project.  Instead, he presents a sort of techno-utopian vision.  Indeed, Teilhard's zeal is plainly religious in its fervor.  He writes, "I salute those who have the courage to admit their hopes extend that far [artificially provoked neo-life]; they are the pinnacle of mankind; and I would say to them that there is less difference than people think between research and adoration."[64] 

There is a naïveté in Teilhard's appraisal of technology and, as we have noted, it is directly traceable to his positivism.  Due to a positivistic view of evolution as a unidirectional ascent (the march of progress), he is forced to embrace every technological advance wholeheartedly.  As he puts it, "Between these two alternatives of absolute optimism or absolute pessimism, there is no middle way because by its very nature progress is all or nothing."[65]  Such a view leads inevitably to what Neil Postman has called Technopoly: "the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, and takes its orders from technology."[66]  Furthermore, Postman makes clear that the origins of Technopoly are directly traceable to Auguste Comte and the positivism that grew up in his wake.[67]

No doubt Teilhard would have protested the use of the term Technopoly.  Such acquiescence to technology was not what he had in mind, but the tendencies towards such a system are present throughout much of his work.  These tendencie­s–the confusion of technos with telos–are nowhere more pronounced than in Teilhard's appraisal of what might well have been the fundamental event of the twentieth century: the dropping of the Atom Bomb.

The single most striking feature with regard to Teilhard's 1946 essay, "The Spiritual Repercussions of the Atom Bomb", is the total lack of concern for the 100,000 dead and countless suffering in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  In fact, they aren't even mentioned.  Instead of alarm Teilhard responds only with exuberance–exuberance at the creative capacity of humanity and science, now vindicated for all the world to see; exuberance at humanity's new place of power; exuberance at the possibility of development to "an indefinite extent."[68] Though in Teilhard's time, men like Albert Schweitzer and Karl Jaspers, humbled and alarmed by the events of August 6, 1945, were already concerned about the possibility of an atomic holocaust, Teilhard never seriously considered anything of the sort.  Rather, he waxes eloquent about the first testing of the A-bomb:

At that crucial instant when the explosion was about to happen (or not happen) the first artificers of the atom bomb were crouched on the soil of the desert.  When they got to their feet after it was over, it was Mankind who stood up with them, instilled with a new sense of power.[69]

The teamwork and global partnership required to produce the A-bomb filled him with optimism.  Likewise, when the hydrogen bomb was tested at Bikini he declared:

The atomic age is not the age of destruction but of union in research.  For all their military trappings, the recent explosions at Bikini herald the birth in to the world of a Mankind both inwardly and outwardly pacified.  They proclaim the coming of the Spirit of the Earth.[70]

 It is helpful to compare Teilhard's responses, full of a genuinely contagious optimism but entirely lacking any reasoned appraisal or concern over the bomb, with Barfield's response.  Teilhard saw the bomb as signaling a new epoch of human consciousness, the mushroom cloud itself indicating that humanity had attained new heights of super-creativity and power.  Barfield, on the other hand, without any trace of R.U.P., saw in the flash of atomic light a call to transformation.  Characteristically, he looks at the event from the perspective of human consciousness.  In his 1951 preface to Poetic Diction, Barfield writes, "The possibility of man's avoiding self-destruction depends on his realizing before it is too late that what he let loose over Hiroshima, after fiddling with its exterior for three centuries like a mechanical toy, was the forces of his own unconscious mind."[71]  Such a warning provides a necessary corrective to Teilhard's position.

Union or Communion?

Looking at Teilhard's thought we can identify a third and final consequence of R.U.P., one that is intimately related to the previous two critiques.  This final criticism deals with Teilhard's notions of convergence and union. 

Convergence and union are two of the weightiest words within the Teilhardian corpus.  For Teilhard, the end of evolution is convergence; the goal, union.  Teilhardian evolution can be conceptualized as a cone.  At the bottom, there lies a mass of atomized granules of matter each with its own, at this point miniscule, psychic component.  As these granules rise to ever higher levels of consciousness (side by side with the rising tide of time) they increasingly converge until they arrive at the point of ultimate union: the aptly named, Omega Point.  Teilhard's oft-repeated maxim fits this conical movement perfectly: everything that rises must converge.

It is easy to spot the danger in such a vision.  Namely, the march of evolution tramples underfoot the diversity, color and character of the many cultures, creatures, personalities and traditions spread throughout the earth.  In the Teilhardian vision of the universe's omega there are no blue herons, no wind-swept sand dunes, no silky otters peeking out of English Bay; also gone are the stomping rhythms of tribal peoples, the harmony of voices in song, the spectrum of rich colors on human skin or in the eyes of our loved ones.  In fact, the whole panoply of earthly diversity has been done away with in the attainment of Omega Point, this immaterial collectivity of unified consciousness.[72]

Teilhard was aware that this might at least be perceived as a problem and he went to great lengths to counter it.  He declared time and again that union differentiates.[73]  He tried to say that the Omega of the world is not impersonal but "hyper-personal", that the super-organism to come will be "a center composed of centers".  Teilhard has some admirable insights here.  He writes, "The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together."[74]  He goes on to explain that such a union–one that preserves our personality and originality–is only possible through the agency of love.  "Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves."[75]

At end however, it is hard to see how such differentiation actually occurs in Teilhard's vision of union.  He asserts again and again that originality will remain intact, but his vision of the Omega Point seems to eradicate all differences.  He speaks of humanity converging in upon itself, increasingly focusing the energy of our reflections inward, "the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere."  It is really quite sad to see Teilhard, that champion of the material world, finally delight in an other-worldly, ultimate transcendence that would have made any medieval ascetic proud.  He describes this ultimate movement,  "detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega."[76]  It becomes clear that Omega is attained not through a communion of differences but through a union that, despite Teilhard's own maxim, fails to differentiate.

Such a vision of an immaterial ultimate has deep roots in world history.  We find, for example, similar visions expressed in religions both east and west.  Wherever it occurs it is problematic, but Teilhard's evolutionary version carries a particular danger.  It is bad enough to conceive of a non-differentiated after-life or a state of absolute union occurring in a transcendent eschaton, but when the vision is placed fully within the scope of history the problem becomes acute for we are encouraged to build towards such a future.  When all of evolution converges first on humanity and then simply on the human mind, the diversity of the biosphere is easily abandoned. Reflecting on this picture, Theodore Roszak writes, "Anybody who wants to explore the philosophy of evolution would do well to start with Teilhard; form the viewpoint of standard biology as well as Deep Ecology, he goes wrong in every way imaginable."[77]  Biodiversity, now recognized as integral to the health of the earth's biosystems and arguably to the human psyche as well, is entirely lost as we march towards Omega.  Shortly thereafter, it is the diversity of human culture, the diversity of the noosphere, that is scoured in the name of progress and evolution.  We can easily imagine how such a vision might play itself out in the world's political and economic spheres.  On the tamer end, Teilhard's techno-utopian vision not only advocates but mandates the creation of a global mono-culture.  On the more radical side, one can imagine something like Huxley's Brave New World appealing to such a vision for justification.

I am in no way suggesting that Teilhard had such atrocities in mind.  On the contrary, he specifically and forcefully repudiated them.[78]  Were he still with us, I have no doubt that Teilhard would be among the first and bravest to stand against the specter of totalitarianism wherever it should arise.  This flaw is not so much in Teilhard the man, as it is implicit within his system.  It is the logical outcome of evolution conceived of as a unidirectional, historical ascent towards an immaterial Omega Point.

As an ulterior to the Teilhardian concepts of convergence and union we could benefit from Barfield's notion of participation.  Despite ending in an immaterial singularity, Teilhard's Omega remains too spatial.  It is, after all, a point, and convergence upon a point necessitates the eradication of difference.  He doesn't so much transcend the subject/object divide as destroy one side of it.  Barfield's participation, on the other hand, is non-local, centered in consciousness and perception.  Final participation is not so much union as communion or integration.  In it, the mature ego becomes conscious of its deep, spiritual rapport with all that is non-self. Barfieldian participation could thus be called ecological for it sees all things as fundamentally interconnected, each individual being joined to all others, themselves nested within larger ecological and cosmological wholes.  This could also be called a Trinitarian vision, for as in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity the persons–Father, Son and Spirit–are said to co-inhere, so too in this vision of the universe does each individual co-inhere with the other, each part containing within itself the whole. Such a perception reweaves the universe to God and ourselves in a web of sacramentality.  Barfield, far from dissolving the universe along with the human self in a final paroxysm of ecstasy, speaks of the time when our felt-consciousness will perceive our inherent participation–our presence in and with–all of nature, a presence that is caught up into the Divine Mystery everywhere revealed.

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Prior to finishing this chapter, I must reaffirm that I, like Barfield, remain quite impressed by Teilhard de Chardin.  I have been a bit unrelenting with him in these last pages, but only with the intention of revealing just how deep seated and dangerous the residue of unresolved positivism can be.  Nietzsche once wrote, "The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men." [79]  Teilhard was a great man and his venerable errors can tell us a great deal about ourselves, our own assumptions and the extent to which we still cling subconsciously to outmoded a prioris of nineteenth century science.  Despite the generosity of Teilhard's spirit and the brilliance of his mind, he found himself still fettered by positivistic assumptions that colored the whole of his system.

Having uncovered these difficulties within Teilhard's thought, we may safely seek to avail ourselves of the light that he sheds and to consider what sort of synthesis might arise out of the meeting of both Barfieldian and Teilhardian systems.  Such a task is the purpose of the next chapter.