Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenology of the Noosphere

Abstract

Although Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was thoroughly trained in philosophy and theology, he was first and foremost a paleoanthropologist, directly involved in the discovery of Homo erectus pekinensis (“Sinanthropus”) in China in the 1920s and 1930s. He came from a Catholic aristocratic background, was ordained a priest in 1911, survived World War I (as a stretcher-bearer, distinguished with the Legion of Honour), joined the Jesuit Order, conducted paleoanthropological field work during the interbellum, and became entangled in a conflict with his Jesuit superiors (over pantheism and the concept of original sin) until his death in New York (in exile more or less). When his writings were published (shortly after his death, as his superiors forbade publication during his lifetime), he quickly became an intellectual celebrity. Currently, he is credited with having anticipated Gaia theory (King, 2006), the global village concept (McLuhan, 1962), the Internet (Barlow, 1992; Cobb, 1998), the WWW (Garreau, 2005, p. 256; Greenfield, 2014, p. 9), transhumanism (Delio, 2014; Steinhart, 2008), the “global brain” (Stock, 1993), and the Anthropocene (e.g. Crutzen, 2002; Steffen et al., 2011).

Rhizomes, nomads, and complexity: A new relational pedagogy for the era of networks, social media and artificial intelligence

“…So, the concept of Omega point bears a profound teleological weight. Teilhard is credited of having anticipated the development of the internet, the network society, the Anthropocene and the Gaia theory (Brailas, 2019;Zwart, 2022). Teilhard's put an emphasis on the combination of the technological and biocultural evolution.…”

“…We observe that the use of the term rhizomatic develops in parallel with the use of the term Internet in the published corpus digitized by Google (Figure 3). Maybe Google itself can be understood as a developing learning rhizome trying to achieve an Omega point, the ultimate noosphere in the words of Teilhard de Chardin (Zwart, 2022). In a networking conception of learning, learners can be understood as autonomous, while interdependent, nomads creating and traversing their personal learning networks in their own ways in the context of a community of co-learners and in the context of a chaotic external environment of available learning resources and potential pathways.…”

Precursors and Antecedents of the Anthropocene

“…With regard to its originality, it has been suggested that thinkers, such as Antonio Stoppani, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, anticipated the concept (for Stoppani see Rull (2017); for Vernadsky see Guillaume (2014); for Teilhard de Chardin see Zwart (2022)). Teilhard de Chardin, for example, coined the term "noösphere" for a new world shaped by the advancement of humanity to a new stage of cognitive evolution, while Stoppani proposed the "Anthropozoic" as the name of a new Earth-historical period impacted by "human relicts", such as tools, weapons, buildings, and so on (Rull 2017, also see Trachtenberg 2015.…”