Becoming and Being ,
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN was a Jesuit priest who was a most distinguished biologist and, more especially, palaeontologist. He did basic work on • the origins of man, for many years in China. After his death in 1955, his most important works, unpublished in his life-time, began to appear in France; and now we have a translation of Le Phenomene 11 amain, said to be his greatest book, Which deservedly had a deep and widespread, effect when published in France. It is to be hoped that the English version will receive similar con- sideration here, and that the publishers will carry out their announced intention of giving us more of this remarkable writer's works.
The Phenomenon of Man is not an easy book to describe, and, in a short space, an impossible one to summarise. It is a kind of sustained medita- tion on the nature and significance of evolution— the evolution, however, not merely of man, nor of animals, nor of all living things, but of the earth and everything on it. Moreover, the study does not just reach back farther into the past than a mere account of biological evolution would do; Fr. Pierre's vision extended into the future of man, and, beyond the historical process altogether, into a transcendental significance of evolution.
Thus, reading into the past, Fr. Pierre sees as underlying the biological processes of evolution, a process of `complexification' which led in the first instance from simple molecules to organic molecules, and from these to protoplasm or living matter. This in its turn, ever more complexly organised, leads to the birth of reflexive con- sciousness, and so to man himself. With the com- ing of man, the nature of evolution changes; it no longer has to work by biological 'groping,' but has become 'conscious of itself.' The future of man is seen as lying in a kind of collectivism— not, however, the mechanical and soulless collec- tivism of totalitarian systems, but a 'personal collectivism' in which individual consciousness and a communal mind, above all in the pursuit of knowledge, are somehow reconciled. Moreover, the whole process of evolution is seen as tending to 'a kind of ultimate ideal, an 'omega point,' as he called it : a point which is ultimately argued to lie outside time, and to be identical with God.
This is not an easy book, in more than one way. Its style; besides its highly individual coinages, takes much from a certain kind ) of French philosophy influenced in expression by Hegel, which, apart from its inherent difficulties, is un- familiar in the English tradition. Again, there are certain points in the book where, suddenly, an almost tangible darkness falls on the argument. These points are characteristically the points of transition, where the author attempts to explain the move from mere life to consciousness, or from the historical order to the transcendental timeless existence of the 'omega point.' On the latter issue, indeed, a sceptic who believes that this transition is impossible, that no argument 'could lead de- cisively from the historical interpretation of evolution to something beyond, will not have his doubts allayed. But it is not a paradox to say that the fact that these should be the points of greatest obscurity is itself a testimony to the book. These are just the points where there must be difficulty, and it is characteristic of the honesty of this book that nothing is fudged.
Apart from these general issues, there are several points at which serious disagreement may be felt. Thus, the collective direction of human evolution is not as decisively indicated as the argument suggests; it is perhaps revealing that Fr. Pierre thinks that totalitarianism, though an evil, is a heresy nearer the truth than indivi- dualism. Again, it is a curious fact that Fr. Pierre only once mentions the possibility, strongly sug- gested by his historical picture, that there ls life elsewhere in the universe, and never lets this pos- sibility affect his teleological arguments about the future of man and of the earth. But even granted a God with purposes—could we know whether His purpose was centred on our survival, rather than on some other of His distant creatures?
But even if one disagrees, even if one thinks that Fr. Pierre's metaphysical undertaking is necessarily impossible, one should read this book. It contains in its central chapters a picture of evolution which has a depth, assurance and imaginative power, which must leave an indelible impression on anyone who takes the trouble to follow it. No one who has read Fr. Pierre on insects, their forms of life and limitations, will ever see them in quite the same way again.
When we turn to Maritain, we are no more familiar, more orthodox, and, to me, less exciting ground. On the Philosophy of History, first, is a new, relatively slight, work, in which the cele- brated Thomist philosopher offers some thoughts on the nature of the philosophy of history and a few of its supposed metaphysical and theological conclusions. Not a great deal is in fact said, and it is unlikely that any reader will find much in Maritain's 'functional laws' of history, for in- stance, which is not already firmly built into his common Sense. The chief one, if I have not mis- understood it, seems to say no more than that good and bad tend to be mixed up in historical changes. A good deal of the book is about the problem of evil in history, and human freewill; here again, it does not seem that Maritain's mild observations make any significant contribution to the age-old problem.
The new edition of The Degrees of Know-
ledge is a new and excellent translation of the fourth French edition of Maritain's magnum opus. The work will be familiar to those interested in modern scholastic philosophy. Enormously learned, it attempts to give a Thomistic account of all our knowledge up to and including the mystical knowledge of God. There is a long dis- cussion of physics and biology, in which much modern work is considered. It is all the more surprising, then, that Maritain should have apparently paid little attention to modern work absolutely central to his system—work on logic, in particular on the notion of existence. The whole of Maritain's system, like any similar Thomistic enterprise, depends on the supposition that we can form an abstract notion of being as such; but this is precisely a supposition which modern logic and philosophy have most drasti- cally called in doubt. So far as I can discover, there is only one paragraph in which Maritain confronts these doubts (in the form in which they were originally raised by Hume and Kant)—and there he completely misunderstands the objec- tions. Thus Maritain gives us no assurance that this enormous work, containing undoubtedly Much of interest on scholastic philosophy and theology, does not rest on sand. It can preach only to the converted.
BERNARD WILLIAMS
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