STILL A CLASSIC.

The Human
Phenomenon
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Translated by Sarah
Appleton-Weber
Sussex Academic Press, $69.95, 320 pp.

Ever since 1959, Bernard Wall's serviceable English translation of Le Phenomene humain has been the main access many of us have had to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's most important book. Now the poet and scholar Sarah Appleton-Weber has given a more painstaking rendition of what is arguably the most visionary work of the last century. Readers will find here a more accurate and reliable translation than the previous one, though Wall's Harper Torchbook version is far from being unusable and it does have the advantage of being affordable. Unfortunately, the price of this new version ($69.95 in hardback) will hardly make Teilhard's vision more accessible to many today. We can only hope that the publishers will soon issue an inexpensive paperback edition. Appleton-Weber's polished translation certainly merits wide distribution.

This authoritative edition, movingly introduced by Brian Swimme, contains numerous illuminating footnotes by the translator, including references to revisions during the manuscript's history prior to publication. Those who have never read Teilhard before will find this new translation very inviting, and those already familiar with him will appreciate the precision that was sometimes lacking earlier. English-language readers for many years to come will be deeply indebted to Sarah Appleton-Weber for her loving and lucid work.

Teilhard wrote most of the Phenomenon during a period of virtual exile in China in the 1920s and '30s. Its main message is that there is an overall directionality in evolution toward increasing "complexity-consciousness." While this interpretation proved too ideological for his fellow scientists, Teilhard's enthusiastic acceptance of an evolutionary understanding of human origins was alarming to his religious superiors, who found it hard to reconcile with church teachings on Original Sin. The Vatican too got involved and refused permission to publish his major work while Teilhard was alive. This rejection was not only emotionally distressful to the brilliant Jesuit paleontologist, but it stood in the way of any improvements or corrections he might have made if he had been given the opportunity to respond to the comments of a wide readership.

How well does Teilhard's major work hold up today? At a time when the dialogue of science with religion is flourishing it is worth asking once again whether Teilhard's essay, originally presented as a work of "science," can still make a significant contribution. Suspected of unorthodoxy by members of his own church during his lifetime, Teilhard has not fared well with the dominantly materialist disposition of evolutionary scientists and philosophers since his death. Jacques Monod accused him of systematically "truckling" to millenarian dreams. Stephen Jay Gould, disgusted by Teilhard's intuition that evolution has a direction, saw him as the leader of a new "cult" and even associated him with the iniquitous Piltdown hoax. Daniel Dennett recently branded him a "loser." A few respected scientists, most notably Julian Huxley and Theodosius Dobzhansky, have defended him, but contemporary scientific works on evolution, if they refer to Teilhard at all, accuse him of drawing conclusions unwarranted by the evidence. Interestingly, many of his critics are themselves metaphysical materialists who consider their own ideas completely free of assumptions extraneous to science.

The renowned biologist and essayist Harold Morowitz has recently issued a more balanced assessment. He does not profess to understand Teilhard's theology, but he does admire Teilhard's biology. He perceptively points out, for example, that the Phenomenon had already anticipated Gould's and Eldredge's celebrated theory of punctuated equilibrium without labeling it as such. Morowitz could also have noted that Teilhard's book effectively defuses anti-Darwinian creationist efforts to interpret the infrequency of transitional fossils as evidence of divine "special creation."

Unfortunately, by insisting that the Phenomenon should be read as a work of science rather than of metaphysics or theology Teilhard did not help his reputation. He naively assumed that those who embrace the scientific spirit should, of all people, be willing to open their eyes. Isn't science, after all, bound to an empirical imperative? Shouldn't it take into account all of the data available to our experience, including the experience of ourselves as subjects, as conscious beings? Why, if we intend to be truly scientific, do we post a No Entry sign at the point where the cosmos exposes an "interior" dimension of emergent consciousness? Isn't subjectivity an objective aspect of the universe?

At any rate, the "phenomenon" Teilhard examines is at bottom not an isolated "human" world, but a universe that cannot be understood objectively without taking into account the human--and along with it the element of interiority or consciousness that runs throughout nature. Like William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Teilhard thought the true spirit of science should lead us to practice a radical form of empiricism. Science should consider the full range of experience, leaving nothing out arbitrarily.

This means, first of all, that science should attend to the "inside" of things and not restrict its gaze to the outside (Appleton-Weber prefers the term "inside" to Wall's "within"). Second, an adequate science should not shut its eyes to the axis of directionality, the increasing complexity-consciousness, in evolution. And, third, since human knowing cannot function without assuming unity and intelligibility as its goal, science may legitimately conclude that any universe that gives rise to our consciousness must itself be convergent on a climactic unity, a destiny that Teilhard refers to abstractly as "Omega."

All of this, Teilhard believed, falls within the compass of science. A narrower "science," one that restricts its focus only to the "outside" of things, cannot see the "human phenomenon" at all except obscurely, through filters that screen out that which is truly unique to it. This inadvertence diminishes not only anthropology but also cosmology. We cannot seriously aspire to understand the universe so long as we leave out of our account its latest great achievement, human consciousness. Only the arbitrary modern segregation of mind from nature has made it possible to look upon the mind "in here" as rootless and the mindless universe "out there" as pointless. If we could learn to see mind as an essential rather than accidental aspect of the universe, a whole new sense of the cosmos and of ourselves would follow.

But is this attention to the world's "inside" really science? The question will be debated increasingly in the years ahead. No doubt Teilhard believed that he was simply telling us what he had seen. His occasional references to himself as a "seer" may seem immodest, but they are really expressions of honesty. Perhaps we are still too "modern" to define science so widely that it embraces the fact of subjectivity or the directional and convergent character of the cosmos. But then perhaps we should be willing to admit that what we mean by science is not as radically empirical as we may have thought.

If scientists today complain about Teilhard's wild "extrapolations," some of his religious admirers wish that he had demonstrated more of an environmental awareness. Like most other religious thinkers of his day, Teilhard did not have what we would call an explicitly ecological sensitivity. However, his most lasting contribution to both religion and ecology will probably turn out to be simply that he taught us how to love the earth without having to turn our backs on heaven. For this reason alone he will find his place among the most important Christian thinkers ever. And to those who believe that religion--for the sake of its intellectual credibility and even its survival--must eventually come to grips with evolution, Teilhard will always shine forth as a model of courage and truthfulness.

John F. Haught teaches theology at Georgetown University. His most recent book is God after Darwin (Westview).