Though it might seem ancient, the idea of a universal history, a history that would encompass all of human existence is a rather recent idea. The most prominent Greek historians, concentrated on pivotal events and larger than life characters. Herodotus, the so called father of history, wrote his rambling and fascinating chronicle on the Persian Wars. Tucídides, a completely different mind altogether, whose purpose was to write a book for the ages, focused on that seminal event which spelled the end of what we know as classical Greece, the Peloponnesian War. Similarly, Roman historians, whether as vast as Tacitus or as gossipy as Suetonious, tended to record events that were within a narrow scope. Plutarch and Suetonious are more akin to what we now know as biographers. Tacitus' narrative seldom strays outside the empire.

If one disregards the root and original meaning of the word history - which comes from the Greek and meant analysis - and if one leaves the Greco-Roman historical tradition and looks at other cultures, the impulse towards an universal history is ever prevalent. Albeit, this prevalence does not divorce the chronology of Greco-Roman historians from myth, superstition and poetry. Still, it is impossible to overlook the Bible and the many other similar sacred texts for many other peoples. In their genealogies one finds not merely tallies of descent but also a history which though inaccurate and tainted by myth, still attempts to fulfill the role of a universal history.

St. Augustine was perhaps one of the first - and definitely one of the first who is also still read - to strive toward a reconciliation of the cold hard-fact reason of the Greco-Roman tradition and the ambitious vista of the Biblical scribe. His De Civitate Dei, though not meant as a history but as a treatise that would vindicate Christianity, gives us the first glimpse of both the possibility and the perils inherent to the form of an universal history. Augustan's City of God is divided into 22 books. Though they are tough going if one does not consider their context (they were written right after Alaric forces sacked Rome) and though they are not meant as a strict, straight forward history, each book contains plenty. In fact it is possible to divide the book in two, seeing the first 10 books as quasi-anthropological histories, where Augustine dwells on the history and costumes of pagan communities. The second half, the last twelve books seem to present the antitheses to the first ten in that they are a "veritable" history of mankind, from Genesis to the Last Judgment.

The argument of City of God would have a seminal influence during the middle ages. Many would see its chronology as forecasting a long chain of potentates, kings and popes. The spirit of the book, not its contents, however, would shine even a brighter light in scholasticism, since what the book's spirits consists of is a synthetic spirit, an attempt to take thesis and antithesis and see the end result, what we call synthesis. Augustin was not using such terminology, though, as a rhetorician he must have been familiar with both terms. In fact, the idea of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, would not enter philosophical synthesis with the force it has since the Enlightenment, until Hegel. But still, such synthetic impulse became the driving force to the great minds of the Middle ages. Aquinas, of course, would employ Aristotle to reconcile faith and reason. And the towering literary achievement of the middle ages, Dante's Commedia, would populate the topography of the afterlife with a historical cast which harked back to Biblical characters, to Romans and Greeks, but also included its long catalog of Popes, Lords, etc.

If anything would make this hope for an universal history dwindle, it might have been the Renaissance. As Renaissance thinkers abandoned the Medieval scholasticism and went back to antiquity for their models, they saw in their Greek and Roman models an objective, rational glance at the world. In fact, in the history of humankind, beginnings ordinarily elude us. But, to Renaissance thinkers, if the advent of "rational" thought or, more accurately, logos, and the decline of mythological thought, could be pin-pointed, it was at the beginning of the sixth century, in Ionian Miletus, by such men as Thales, Anaximenes. These men, according to their Renaissance heirs, ushered a new way to think about nature. They made it the object of detached systematic investigation (a history) and offered a comprehensive view of it (a theory). The explanations they proposed for the origin of the world, its composition and structure, and all meteorological phenomena were unencumbered by the dramatic machinery of earliest theogonies and cosmogonies.

The Renaissance was, of course, idealizing the thought and thinkers of antiquity. Nevertheless this idealization set the standards for whatever universal history, or whatever, historiae there were to come in the future. The supernatural agents whose adventures, struggles and exploits formed the web of creation myths and traced the emergence of the world and the establishment of order were no longer allowed; nor was any allusion to the gods as linked to the forces of nature. The great paradigmatic shift that we call the Renaissance, in other words, entailed a spirit of positivism. Nothing existed that was not nature. The human and the natural world made up a single world. The ways in which nature had come into being were understandable to human beings.

The positivist spirit of the Renaissance has informed every human endeavor since, whether this endeavor is philosophical, historical, etc. Much of what we have seen in this book, the theory of evolution, physics, etc., are the direct descendants of the Renaissance spirit. However, when one looks at the constraints which this positivism imposed upon the different disciplines, it is a wonder how so many intellects still pursued the dream of a vast history. The Enlightenment would of course produce monumental and encyclopedic works like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, but if one name should surface as the first disciplined attempt to gather an universal history, it is Giambattista Vico. Within the history of ideas, Vico has a special role indeed. He has been adopted by so many ideological camps that it is now difficult to get a clear sense of his project. Vico's main ambition was to redefine human history and to provide a new philosophy for this new, redefined history, to form a unified vision of man and the world. He performed this feat in a complex, badly-written book entitled La Scienza Nuova.

Ironically enough - almost as proof that the world has not changed at all since Vico's day - The New Science had difficulty getting published, not because of its bad writing, but because of its merits, its qualities. Vico's New Science saw mankind - nations, civilizations, cultures - as going through progressive stages from bestiality to high civilization and then sinking back into barbarism. Vico, in other words was a pioneer in starting the tradition in which history is not merely a chronology or an accretion of dates, but a series of stages, of rises and falls. This tradition of looking for patters and of pointing out stages in history has gone hand in hand with the use of history as a predictor. And Vico was also a pioneer on this. As he probed the different stages of human history, his most shocking prediction was that the second barbarism engulfs civilizations after they reach their apex is worse than the first one with which they started. The original barbarian possesses rude virtues, Vico argued, the latter one has none left. And while his vision of two barbarisms punctuating the beginning and ends of civilizations might seem a bit contrived nowadays, there is a specificity in the writing that seems prescient in its psychological insight. For the second barbarism that Vico predicted came about, he argued, as the crowded city life produces men who are unbelievers, who regard money as measure of all things and who lack moral qualities, particularly modesty, duty to the family and courage. Emancipated from ethics, they live by spying and deceit.

The New Science has had a strange life. Vico died in the middle of the eighteenth century not completely obscure, but definitely ignored in ways in which he did not deserve to be. If fact if recognition came to him it came during the 19th century when historians like Michelet found his methods and ambition akin to their own projects. The New Science must have also influenced both Hegel's and Marx's vision of historic processes; even if in their work they seemed to contradict some of Vico's premises. Ironically, of course, the twentieth century has had more than an ambiguous. Few thinkers have subscribed to the idea of a history which envisions stages. Instead, historians have chosen to view history in thematic transformations. One of our most eminent historians for instance, Philipe Aries has written a history of childhood and a history of death. The results, in his case have always been satisfactory. In other cases they have hardly been so. Foucault's History of Sexuality, unfortunately a much more influential book, is full of inaccuracies and historical solecisms which would get the Freshman history student's knuckles rapped.

The thematic view of history has been a reaction against determinism. However, those, whose life work has been an extended battle against determinism, have been some of the most ardent defenders of Vico's work. What they praise in the work is not Vico's vision of history, which though central they manage to ignore, but Vico's anthropological and ethnic insights. Chief among Vico's advocates, has been the Latvia born, Oxford philosopher, Isaiah Berlin. Berlin's Historical Inevitability published in 1955, stands alongside with his colleague Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and its Enemies as chief text in the critique of determinism. Later, books like The Age of Enlightenment and Four Essays on Liberty would develop the anti-deterministic strain, for in determinism, Berlin saw the seed to totalitarian and mechanized societies. There is little space for us to see how his argument is praiseworthy. It is impossible to deny that determinism has, like any other idea, has had noxious historical repercussions. Hitler, Franco, Stalin and Mussolini's rhetoric were completely propelled by deterministic view of history. Nevertheless, as current Marxist have been fond of reminding us, some forms and manifestations of Marxism are vulgar Marxism, which precludes thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin and Gramsci. Similarly, Berlin's critique of determinism fails to see that there is vulgar determinism and educated determinism.

His assessment of Vico is a case in point. In a thorough insightful essay, he manages to completely ignore what constitutes Vico's central schemata: the division of history into stages whose dynamics resemble each other. Berlin praises instead, Vico's anthropological insight, his ability to see how " the experience of a particular society" can be ascertained from its "myth, form of worship, or language." According to Berlin this sensitivity, "opened new doors:" "It discredited the idea that some static spiritual kernel of a timeless and unchanging 'human nature.'" Berlin's reading of Vico does find merit where merit is due, but still manages to botch Vico's main argument. That "each stage of civilization generates its own art, its own sensibility and imagination," as Berlin puts it, does not entail that for Vico there is no "spiritual kernel of a timeless and unchanging 'human nature.' Vico sees language, costume, myth as he says in his own words "general principles." Moreover, he sees stages, the growth and decline of each culture as predetermined.

So Berlin's praise is, of course, though very brilliant also biased. Like so many of the very intelligent thinkers we have encountered throughout this book, he has misrepresented an idea in order to suit his political and ideological needs. And while his political and ideological goals were noble, the perversion is no less dishonest and harmful. If a long established influence like Vico, an influence which informed much of the historical thinking in the 19th century, manages to get his ideas thwarted by one of the most important thinkers in this century merely because that thinker has a bone to pick with determinism, then imagine what can happen to barely established and revolutionary thought in our age, or worse imagine what the new universal history by the modern day Vico would read like if this historian attempted to subscribe to modern ideology.

Imagination might be put to hard tests sometimes, but in order to imagine what would happen to the new, revolutionary re-envisioning of universal history, it is sufficient to follow the fate of The Human Phenomenon. For where Vico still has to resort to Biblical scripture and other history tainted by myth and whereas Vico only deals with history and never dwells on pre-history, Teilhard de Chardin's book is a veritable universal history. Moreover, The Human Phenomenon is an universal history which precludes the known historical fact in order to explain how the unknown cosmological and evolutionary fact shaped our present and will shape our future.

Alas, like Vico's Science, Teilhard de Chardin's The Human Phenomenon has been misunderstood, misquoted and too much maligned. We have already seen how Simpson and Medwar have disregarded Teilhard de Chardin's The Human Phenomenon, saying it is a collection of "tedious metaphysical conceits." However, even Teilhard de Chardin champions have misunderstood and misrepresented his thought. Some, like Robert Right, have seen him as "the prophet of globalization." The label is so reductive, so inflected with today's political ideology that it is no wonder that Teilhard de Chardin gets short shrift in serious circles. Globalization is nothing more than today's political slogan, a by-word by which politicians can further their sponsors latest sales pitch. Teilhard de Chardin does suggest that thought would 'converge" so to speak and we will see his argument in much more depth shortly. Nevertheless, one should not confuse globalization, that new greed of corporations, with real thought. That Coke's ads makes it to the Bororo and to the Hindustani should be no great pride and definitely has little to do with thought. Teilhard de Chardin was most definitely not a prophet of profit. Other thinkers have attributed him yet another prophecy, the means of instantaneous communication and the internet. And while Teilhard de Chardin might have agreed that any way in which to convey information would further humankind, these advocates fail to see that unlike most prophets of the age of communications, unlike the Marshall Mac Luhans of the world, who like the means of communication and could not give a hoot about their content, Teilhard de Chardin main concern was not the means, but the end. He was, in short, more concerned with the content of the information that with the means by which it got distributed.

Similarly, other thinkers have reduced the ideas behind The Human Phenomenon and seen them as mere emulation and even pilfering of Eastern thought with which Teilhard de Chardin became familiar during his years in China. And while some of these writers might be correct in pointing out similarities and resemblances, The Phenomenon of Man, in its plan and its ambition as well as its background is a thoroughly western book, that manages to fulfill that unfulfillable goal of a universal history and do it through science.

The science in the book has been often questioned, as we have seen before. And as we have promised, the following chapters will be dedicated to checking Teilhard de Chardin's predictions or assertions against the latest claims of the different branches of science. For the moment, however, we would like to place The Human Phenomenon in the right perspective and to do so requires us to see the book not as some desperate attempt of a believer to reconcile faith and science, nor as some botched reading or interpretation of evolution, and definitely not as the pilfering off other philosophies or religious ideas. If The Phenomenon of Man is anything, it is a post-enlightenment Western book. In fact its two central premises place it smack in the middle of the late Western tradition.

The first of these premises, as a matter of fact, seems akin to the ideas we have discussed earlier on in the chapter. Teilhard de Chardin, like the Renaissance thinkers who managed to conceive of nature and man as one via Greek thought, assumes that humanity is, as the title suggests, a phenomenon. In both the social and natural sciences, this premise is crucial. For both to have principles upon which to work they have to assume that there are some general patterns in human bodies, human cells and human behavior which can be studied. What aligns Teilhard de Chardin even closer to the Western tradition is his attempt to amalgamate or synthesize the two traditions. So while the book will study humans not as mysteries, not as unsolvable, but as a phenomenon, as something that can be studied, and while this study will be accomplished through the use of historical methods, the use of eras and chronologies, this history is seen under science's microscope.

In other words, The Human Phenomenon is a history, a veritable universal history. It traces the emergence of matter and the forces that control its behavior; it outlines the geological changes which not only defined the surface of the planet, but the geological conditions which allowed for the emergence of life, and finally maps out the emergence and evolution of life. This history comes to an end with the emergence of intelligence. But if there is something revolutionary and important about the history is not its detail. De Chardin is neither Gibbon, nor Michelet. Closer to Vico, he is interested in a larger vista, in overall patterns and stages. Unlike previous Historians, even previous Natural historians, he does not cast his chronology in hypothesis, but rather filters every stage through his second important premise.

The Human Phenomenon conceives of history as the manifestation of evolution. Unlike most scientists who, at that point, only applied evolutionary theory to life on earth, Teilhard de Chardin saw evolution at work not only in the polymerization of a protein chain which tunneled life into the universe, but also in the emergence of inorganic matter, in the formation of galaxies and solar systems and of course in formation of the lithosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. In fact a good third of The Human Phenomenon dwells on the inorganic.

Teilhard de Chardin's focus on inorganic matter is not merely an attempt to argue his point. It is in matter that he finds some of the basic principles that will guide his interpretation of evolution. As many of his essays attest, Teilhard de Chardin, while not a specialist was more than conversant with Special and General Relativity as well as with quantum. So, really the principles that he ensues in his history of matter are principles that all scientists agree upon. Teilhard de Chardin sees matter as inherent of three qualities. From special relativity, he knows that matter is frozen energy. All matter is energy. Nevertheless, or rather, because of its being frozen energy, matter manifests itself in different forms. From particle physics Teilhard de Chardin knew that mater was diverse, or as he said in a rather Whitmanesque turn of phrase, pluralistic or atomistic. The latter is the fragmented world of quantum, a world which Teilhard de Chardin knew made no sense. However, he argued that despite this atomism, despite the fragmentation, matter was at heart unified and to avouch for this unity he resorted to the fact that despite "splitting and pulverizing" matter, it all obeyed the same laws and manifested the same behavior.

The tripartite quality that De Chardin saw in matter led him to think of it as naturally aligning along two axis. Matter could accumulate, agglomerate, or it could fragment. These two qualities alone for Teilhard de Chardin are already enough to signal some sort of evolution. Matter while inert, by obeying certain laws, has to change:

As seen in its central portion, which is the most distinct, the evolution of matter in current theory, comes back to the gradual building up of the various elements recognized by physical chemistry. To begin with, at the very bottom there is still unresolved simplicity, luminous in nature and not to be defined in terms of figures. Then suddenly came a swarming of elementary corpuscles, both positive and negative (protons, neutrons, electrons, photons)...Then the harmonic series of simple bodies strung out from hydrogen to uranium on the notes of the atomic scale.

To many, accretion does not suffice as evidence of evolution. And Teilhard de Chardin must have been aware of this. However, we must remember that the spirit of The Human Phenomenon is historical and as a good historian Teilhard de Chardin cannot see the past as a collection of mere isolated phenomena, but can only consider it in the light of the outcomes. So, since this agglomeration, this accretion or accumulation ultimately allowed for polymerization, then Teilhard de Chardin counts it as a central part of evolution. His argument should not be mistaken for a vulgar post hoc, ergo propter hoc, Teilhard de Chardin is aware that in this accumulation of things, in this accretion of particles, there are many false roads and bad ends. In fact, The Human Phenomenon dedicates a rather long passage to crystals and the way in which, in them, the accretion of particles seems to follow a path which "closed prematurely upon" their evolution.

Like the thought of any important thinker, Teilhard de Chardin's thought was long in gathering. It involved many different starts, many failed attempts and much preliminary writing The Human Phenomenon came about. And since The Human Phenomenon is, by necessity, rather elliptical at points, some of the essays that precede it seem to shed a lot of light on what Teilhard de Chardin argues. If some readers are still convinced that his is a post hoc, ergo propter hoc it should be sufficient to say that he is convinced that as science reads and understands the world, then life would not be possible. So his particular interpretation of evolution entails the impetus of a force other than the five forces of nature which we have seen. Before we go into the details, the accuracy and the necessity of Teilhard de Chardin's argument, we should follow his logic though another essay. For the moment, suffice it to say that to Teilhard de Chardin, evolution is merely the manifestation of this other force.

In "The Atomism of the Spirit" Teilhard de Chardin asks us to imagine how unbelievable, how far away from common sense the "molecular structure" of our bodies seems. At first sight, we are en entirety, our mere fragmentation presages death. Nevertheless, science has told us that the "fundamental condition of our lives" is molecular: we are a collection of molecules. Similarly he asks us to ponder how unbelievable the flexibility and expansion of thee universe seems. In short, to Teilhard de Chardin, a mere change in perspective, a mere peering into the micro-world or beholding of the cosmos change the way we define ourselves. Both worlds, according to Teilhard de Chardin and according to many other scientists as well seem to forbid life. Or as Teilhard de Chardin would eloquently state, the universe of physicists is built "along a spatial axis, and it is precisely along this axis that life does not appear." There is no life to the particles and no life to the cosmos, at least not if we see it in purely mathematical, spatial relations. So what Teilhard de Chardin will ask us to imagine is the following: if we are willing to believe the irrationality of both quantum and relativity, of a weird particle and or a relative space-time, why, witnessing the phenomenon of life itself would we be so surprised, so trenchant against the idea that there is yet another dimension:

Once a breakthrough has been affected above ourselves, running across the very large and the very small, and so allowing the axis of the complex a clear passage, then a new cosmic milieu is created by the addition of this additional dimension; and in this milieu the vitalization of matter immediately ceases to appear puzzling or inexplicable. On the contrary, it seems 'natural' as the variation in mass with high speeds or the appearance of at very great distances of the effects of relativity .

Teilhard de Chardin's essay might at seem first a good piece of sophistical reasoning, asking us to ponder how irrational the findings of science seem and then proposing another less "irrational" idea. However, Teilhard de Chardin's conclusion is no mere logical legerdemain. No he offers a real, tenable solution to what to many seemed irresolvable. And to paraphrase David Z. Albert's comments of David Bohm's Pilot Wave, his solution is simple, elegant. According to Teilhard de Chardin, to understand the phenomenon of life and to understand the human phenomenon we most see it and us as the amalgamation, the combination, the funneling, the synthesis of the agglomeration found at the high densities of stars and space and of the fragmentation found at the microscopic level.

This synthesis according to Teilhard de Chardin occurs because the other dimension functions through organization and manifests itself as complexity. Teilhard de Chardin adds another possibility in the multiple evolutionary tracks. The laws of nature as we know them without accounting that extra dimension that Teilhard de Chardin calls for can only determine two outcomes of inorganic matter: it can become really big or really small. The other dimension allows for a different evolutionary track, things can become really simple like Helium or really complex.

For Teilhard de Chardin complexity has yet been unfathomed by humans, despite our machines, our technology, etc. He is not as some people have assumed the sort of scientist who writes up the schemes in order to place man at the apex. In fact, if we are to understand complexity as Teilhard de Chardin understood it, we can only understand it if we see it only as the manifestation of that other dimension he mentions in "The Atomism of the Spirit." Better yet, as that energy which really forms the core of his thought: namely, what he called radial energy.

Scientists use the term radial energy for something completely different, so to understand what Teilhard de Chardin meant we should look at the essay in which Teilhard de Chardin began to envision this energy. Like "The Atomism of the Spirit," "Note on the Divine Action in the Universe" precedes The Human Phenomenon and should be seen as one of the many seeds to the great work. As such, the kernel bore quite a fruit and is quite remarkable on its own. In the essay, Teilhard de Chardin starts with an analogy:

A Comparison may help bring home in a more concrete form the reflections that follow, Imagine a sphere, and within it a large number of springs packed close together. Let these springs, moreover, expand or contract as they wish, spontaneously. Such system might represent the universe and the multitude of activities. Teilhard de Chardin's comparison envisions the universe as many scientists have chosen to imagine it. A chaotic conglomeration of matter, which, as springs are, is especially susceptible to, forces, a random mechanism where whatever happens to have form does so by accident. However, this is far from Teilhard de Chardin's final image, for his sphere, contains an "extra spring" which is "much more central and much more powerful than the others" and which organizes the movement of the others.

Teilhard de Chardin's terminology is always shifting and always problematic. Radial energy would be in some essays the 'God factor" in others "Psychic energy" and to avoid confusion we cannot set on radial energy, though it might be the best term he coined, since the word radial connotes light emanating from a common center, an arrangement like a radius within a circle, as in the spokes of a bicycle wheel and along with centrality it also connotes immateriality. These are the very qualities of the radial force.

However, Teilhard de Chardin was also avoiding a dualism, a gap between the two energies so he argued that all energy was radial:

To avoid a fundamental dualism, at once impossible and antiscientific, and at the same time to safeguard the natural complexity of the stuff of the universe, I accordingly propose the following as a basis for all that is to emerge later.

We shall assume that essentially all energy is psychic in nature; but add that in each particular element this fundamental energy is divided into two distinct components; a tangential energy...and a radial energy.

One of the reasons why so many people have reacted against Teilhard de Chardin is because despite the fact that his insights, his discoveries, his history seems unpopulated. Unlike the Tacituses of the world, whose prose is choked full of Caesars and Senators, Teilhard de Chardin's history has no name. This admittedly strange feature might be unsettling. Nevertheless the lack of personage is not unintended. The book attempts, not the study of a single phenomenon, nor the exploration of personality but the study of humanity as a phenomenon.

If all histories have outcomes, Teilhard de Chardin's outcome is humanity. Nevertheless, unlike most histories where outcomes close the final chapter, for Teilhard de Chardin the outcome is provisional. Teilhard de Chardin sees in human intelligence the synthesis of both the pluralism and the fragmentation of nature. And he sees this synthesis made possible by the existence of a radial energy whose manifestation is complexity. Human intelligence is for Teilhard de Chardin not the final but the highest stage which complexity has reached. His schema still holds by the end of The Human Phenomenon. Like any other thing subject to evolution, human intelligence might, just as crystals, stagnate. Its ultimate goal, according to Teilhard de Chardin, is what some of Teilhard de Chardin's advocates have called globalization but should really be understood as an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. Unlike Vico who predicted decadence, Teilhard de Chardin predicted, with the reservations inherent to his schema, a place where conscience, human intelligence not merely influences its own environment, but actually is able to determine certain evolutionary tracks.