The Phenomenon of Man

Summary: A synthesis of evolutionary thought and teleology culminating in a collective consciousness or Omega Point.

I recently reviewed (https://bobonbooks.com/2025/07/21/review-the-divine-milieu/) de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu in which de Chardin traces our growth in godlikeness toward the end of Christ uniting all things in himself. In that book, de Chardin attempts to integrate an understanding of evolution with Christian ideas. De Chardin wrote The Phenomenon of Man a decade later. In it, he elaborates his ideas about the evolutionary process and its telos in a uniting of all conscious, the noosphere in what de Chardin calls “the Omega Point.” He was not permitted to publish either book during his life, both being published show more posthumously in 1957.

The work is divided into four books. The first describes the origins of the material universe. One of the most important ideas running throughout this work is the inner and outer energies, mind and matter, that constitute all matter. The outer included crystallising and polymerising material.

The second book traces the transition of this material to living organisms from single cells to the expansion of life. He argues that this is not a random process but reflects the working of the inner “mind” through outer matter. Furthermore, life develops increasing complexity in “the tree of life” until the rise of consciousness in hominid.

Then book three traces the development of thought within the human race. Not only are humans self aware, but they also convey their knowledge to others. For de Chardin, this network of shared though results in a thinking layer, or noosphere, that encircles the earth. Consequently, humanity is heading toward a decisive turning point or choice, either toward stillborn destruction or to emergence as a kind of “supersoul.” Our collective consciousness culminates in a new level of existence.

Finally, in book four, de Chardin describes this new level of existence as “the Omega Point.” All the consciousnesses will become singular. Science, technology and religion will come together. Our instincts to survive and to love will come together.

A few observations. One is that de Chardin is hard to read. He creates words like involution and noosphere. A second is that most evolutionary scientists would reject any idea of a telos for evolution. Finally, for me, the most telling is that while de Chardin skates on the edge of orthodoxy in The Divine Milieu, he goes over the edge in this book from theism to panentheism, what he describes as “God all in everyone.” Gone from this book is the idea of God uniting all things in Christ. Rather, all things are united in the noosphere and evolves into a super consciousness.

I have seen an increase in interest in de Chardin in recent years. I can’t help but wonder if the advent of AI and ideas like Ray Kurzweil’s singularity are bringing de Chardin to renewed attention. Personally, I consider all of this as just one more version of humanity’s penchant for “tower of Babel” projects. I wish de Chardin had stopped at The Divine Milieu. This book is neither good science nor good theology but rather an exercise in speculative and wishful thinking. show less

The Unifying Evolutionary Drive of Consciousness

"The Phenomenon of Man" by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is an extraordinary visionary book. Written in 1938, it predicted the advent of a so-called Noosphere, a layer of knowledge covering and connecting our planet, which has found a physical expression in the form of today's internet.

The book is mostly about paleontology, how life arose from abiotic material and how life evolved to generate man, who in its turn will lead to a convergence of evolution in what Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega point. This unique vision showing how the one became many and the many will become one again finds a strong resonance in the present day hype of the coming Technological Singularity.

But the book is show more not merely an accurate overview of the phenomenological aspects of evolution by a paleontologist; Teilhard de Chardin transcends the scientific method in giving a rightful place to the "within" of forms of being. This within is "consciousness" and if life was able to perfect itself to progress from mere physical interactions to sensations and culminating in knowledge of self and environment then this is because there was a conscious awareness associated with it, from the smallest forms of existence onwards.

Teilhard de Chardin therefore a priori seems a panpsychist or rather a pantheist, who pinpoints exactly the sole essence which really counts. But he does not stop there: Evolution has a direction, namely the direction of concentrating consciousness in form, striving towards an apotheosis of knowledge, which gradually is attained by the formation of the noosphere and which will culminate in the theogenesis of the Omega point. But this Omega point is not a simple merger of the drop with the ocean as in Hinduism, which advocates the dissolution of the (false) ego. Rather, the Omega point is the essence of "personalisation" in which the true ego of each living human reaches its pinnacle.

Written in days when totalitarian systems were usurping the power in the world, Teilhard de Chardin recognises that although there is a fundamental and crucial drive in the unifying purpose of such systems, their execution thereof is wrong by the very denial of the rights of the individual. Unification needs to be all-inclusive and lead to an expression of the best anyone can be. From a profound humanitarian point-of-view and not as a matter of exclusion of the weaker, Teilhard de Chardin even anticipates the necessity of eugenics to avoid degeneration of the physical aspects of the species in a world of abundance.

The strange thing is that Teilhard de Chardin was a Catholic Priest and his pantheistic and evolutionary ideas do not only prima facie seem to be contradictory to his religion but were de facto strongly condemned by his Church. Interestingly, Teilhard de Chardin sought to unify these opposing views by stating that the Omega point is not necessarily a future construct, but in fact in a sense is already there as the "Great Presence". He is able to justify his ideas as "Christian" as he reveals a proper unifying drive in all that is, an expression of intelligence and love seeking connection from the smallest particle to the highest creature. Thus his Pantheism is more a Panentheism in which God has both an immanent and transcendent aspect.

This is a book that even today has not lost a grain of its importance but rather is of ever increasing relevance in the light of the rapidly approaching Singularity.

A must read for every contemporary and future oriented philosopher! show less

This book has interesting ideas. Some of them I could believe in. Unfortunately, many of Teilhard's arguments are poorly constructed and teleological. His idea of noosphere reminds me of things I've read in works by Hofstadter, which I find very intriguing. But his approach is based on religious motives and his style is that of pseudo-science, so I'll stick with books by Hofstadter, Dennett, Rucker, etc.

This is a difficult book to review, as I wasn't sure what to make of it as a whole. It varies between the brilliant and the confusing, possibly nonsense.
Considering that it was originally written in the 1930s,it starts off very well in giving an overview of the stuff of the universe, and the evolution of complex life, starting from the atom and moving upward through molecular self-replicating units and to ourselves. This is very well informed for its day, and captures the wonder of the world around us, physics, and evolution. Its content, and the excitement of scientific understanding is quite comparable to some of the writing of Dawkins. There are a small number of errors here and there but they are due to the incomplete scientific show more understanding of that age, and do not mar the gist of the first few chapters.
Where this books starts to really lose the reader is through the use of several new words for concepts that the author is introducing, or his specific use of existing words for strange specialist meanings. Some of these can be justified and aid the understanding, whereas others just serve to confuse the reader, or leave questions as to whether the author is discussing a mystical concept, a philosophical concept, or a scientific concept. Without these problems the arguments presented in this book would have been easier to follow.
What remains though, is that the author was a visionary, including his prediction and discussion of noogenesis and the formation of the noosphere (two of the words he coins here), or in other words the growth of intelligence in a sense as an extension from the physical confines of the human mind, and its encapsulation of the earth. This mirrors in a lot of its details what we have recently seen with the progression of the world wide web or "cyberspace". There are other lines of thought that he reflects on extensively, including the future evolution of the human species, and he was among the first to attempt to tackle many of the difficult questions concerning this. He promotes a global society, without racial segregation, while at the same time seriously exploring ideas of genetic engineering and ethical approaches to eugenics, and technological enhancement (what might be termed transhumanism by some people today). He follows this to an ultimate evolutionary stage that he terms the "Omega Point", some kind of apex of consciousness, spiritual development, social development, etc. This is where the book reaches its peak science fiction levels, possibly straying into mysticism, and I was confused by the argument he put forward to how this all worked. He makes it clear that it is only speculation, but he does speculate very seriously on what to me seemed like quite a tenuous concept.
So, it would be difficult to recommend this book without reservation due to some of its metaphysical aspects which will test the patience of many readers expecting a clearer cut scientific work. Indeed, it was not evident in many places, increasingly toward the end of the book, whether there was anything of substance in some of the discussions due to the obfuscating terminology. However, as a provocation for thought, this book is not in short supply of inspiration, and much worth reading is interspersed among the more tenuous sections. show less

This is the book to which Aldous Huxley provided an introduction, and for which Peter Medawar provided an annihilation: "to expound is to expose". See "Pluto's Republic".

Teilhard establishes the fact that the fundamental process or motion of the universe os evolution. Nothing is wholly new; there is some primordium or rudiment or archetype of whatever exists. Consciousness is not new, but the direction of evolution is toward cerebralisation--"Among the infinite modalities in which the complilcation of life is dispersed," the "differentiation of nervous tissue stands out...as a significant transformation". It provides a direction/ vector. Evolution went straight to work on the brain (except for plants, except for insects), neglecting show more everything else. Here he describes the "noogenesis", the birth of higher consciousness, and the noosphere, where it is deployed.

I love the imaginative turn of phrase and am not put off, as more scientific persons (Doctor Medawar) may be by adjectives. To avoid persecution, the author had to add layers of edits and apologia, often just getting in more trouble with the dogmatists. This work contains his "Epiloque", "Postscript", and "Appendix" -- the latter emphasizing the evolutionary vector on the horizon of time, in which "the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross." !! Brilliant save. show less

I really tried to love this book, which contains a number of ideas that I find wacky but exciting. I'm sad to say that it was something of a letdown. The astonishing concepts are weighed down by unpalatable writing (or translating, possibly) and a truly strange style of argumentation. Teilhard's pretense that his worldview, which contains a number of fascinating ties to mystical visions from the medieval West and the Far East, is a simple product of scientific reasoning absolutely fails to convince. I was reminded of Spinoza's Ethics, where the logical apparatus forms a tedious and ineffective mask for the imaginative philosophical/religious core.

This is a landmark book, and I'm glad that I read it. I just wish I could say that it was show more more of a pleasure to experience. Teilhard seems like a fascinating and somewhat tragic figure; better writing would have made him much more sympathetic. show less

This is an overly convoluted work that tries to take theology and evolution and combine them in a philosophy that sees man continuing to develop into a union with the universe. It's much more sophisticated than anything like "Intelligent Design," and yet it relies too much on logical conjecture rather than science.