This book has a long history. It began with the reading of Teilhard de Chardin work and the realization that there was a disturbing discrepancy between what Teilhard de Chardin thought and what his scientific successors think without there necessarily being that many inaccuracies in Teilhard de Chardin's scientific work. There is something extremely exciting about our intellectual climate. Never in the history of the species have we had so many answers to what used to be the eternal questions. Never have we had so many coherent theories explaining every phenomenon that was mysterious even hundred years ago. We understand the brain. We have made tremendous inroads in the understanding of memory - that most mysterious of gifts. We have a pretty certain idea about the cosmos which puzzled our ancestors. We know its origin, its composition, its size. We know where we came from and how we came as we did. We know also the innermost secrets of matter and the atom. And still, despite the excitement in all this knowledge, never in our history has there been such sense of anomie in intellectual circles. Like revelers in one of those excessive banquets we find Roman historians describing, our thinkers seem bored, satiated: nothing will prod them. It is as if they've had too much stimulation. And with so many answers, it seems that there has never been such waste.
We are prisoners of historical circumstance. The critique on knowledge and thought that took roots in Nietzsche's work and then gained urgency and volume after WWII did so because many thinkers realized that so much of our intellectual self assurance as a culture and as a species was abused in the rhetoric of fascism and nazism. After Hitler and Stalin, after Hiroshima and the Holocaust, every human endeavor seemed suspect. After genocides and famines and repressions, it is hard to believe in our lofty nature. Even science, that rarefied branch of human endeavors showed itself more than an accomplice to the atrocities of our last century. The projectiles devastating whole populations, the chemicals poisoning the planet, etc. are nothing but scientists' own handy work.
The critique of knowledge that has made us question our centrality and the centrality of intelligence is, in other words, nothing but accurate and necessary. After forty years, however, we think that it has run out of steam. It seems to us that those thinkers who focus on uncovering our ethnocentrism, or the false self-assurance we derive from our rationality are not following initial aim of the critique anymore, but merely following the motions. Their critique is emptier and vainer that the word honor which it might try to deconstruct.
To us much of the neglect that Teilhard de Chardin has suffered stems from the fact that he is not au courrant so to speak. His thought does not only follow what has become the increasingly nihilistic worldview, but sets out to deny it. Teilhard de Chardin, unlike any other thinker this century, reminds us that we are here for a purpose, reminds us that the universe and life is neither pointless nor accidental, reminds us that thought and intellect are central. Some think of his views as naïve. Nothing could be further from the truth. He is as aware as Nietzsche was of the lie lurking under our speech; as aware as any scientists of the many facts that belied our sense of centrality. Unlike most thinkers and scientists he took the extra step and instead of pointing out the obvious, he aligned himself with the great synthetic tradition of the 19th century and attempted to deal with our very non-central position in the cosmos, our very weaknesses. He accomplished this because behind the philosophic mind, he had a scientific background. Science in other words, gave him the answer. Science allowed him to understand that if we were to restore a purpose to our lives, if we were, as a species, to think of aims and teleology, then we had to understand ourselves as components in a larger and more transcendent entity.
Teilhard de Chardin did not only provide a coherent system, a lucid vision and solution to the scientific and philosophical problems that his vision entailed, but he backed his vision us with the scientific data available at the time. His data was accurate, remains accurate. In fact, it is uncanny how prescient he was about selecting his data. Very little of what he argued through has become outdated. Still, he is shunned in scientific circles. The main aim of this book is to convince both scientists and thinkers that Teilhard de Chardin has an important and cogent vision which should be reconsidered.
The book however is not meant as an expert tract on scientific knowledge. Experts know that by the time information makes it into a book, it is old news. Periodicals and now the Internet are the ways in which to get the cutting edge scientific information. No, the book intends to use what by know is pretty much "dogma" in the scientific community and show how it compares to Teilhard de Chardin's ideas. The book intends to demonstrate that Teilhard de Chardin's ideas are more valid and current now than they were half a century ago when they were first written. Furthermore, the book asks the reader to see how the Teilhard's de Chardin's ideas are not merely current but actually are vital to our future. No one, no scientist or philosopher offered a vaster ecological perspective in his/her work. If nothing else, Teilhard de Chardin reminds us that as humans we have choices, that despite what the nihilistic philosophies of our days say, our choices can be right or wrong and that they have an impact beyond our own immediate circle, beyond our own short lives. Teilhard de Chardin reminds us that we are part of something larger and less transient than ourselves.
To flesh Teilhard de Chardin's work out we have done the following; we attempted to explain as clearly as possible what the three main branches of scientific knowledge. Then we have tried to show how these branches and their findings can be understood through Teilhard de Chardin's work and how through Teilhard de Chardin they become, not merely uninteresting jargon, but relevant subjects which illuminate our existence. The book, unfortunately, could not be an easy read. It is unfortunate and lucky at the same time that if one attempts any sort of synthetic thought, one's writing has to amble every discipline. There are references to most major scientists and artists in the book. We have tried to fill as many gaps as we could. Ultimately, we held to the believe that readers cannot be spoon fed all the time. So if there is a reference to Haydn and the reader is not familiar with either Haydn or the piece we discussed, or if there is a reference to a philosopher the reader has never encountered, then we beg the reader not merely to bear with us, but to do what most good readers have done for centuries, go and find out. Listen to the Haydn, read the philosopher. If nothing else, Teilhard de Chardin's work has been affected because his detractors do not share our or his views on reading and readership. Teilhard de Chardin believed in an active and reactive reader, in an intelligent and challenging thinker confronting his thought. We could hardly fit his challenge, but through this book we hope we have at least matched his wish.
