from Merriam-Webster dictionary:
noosphere: the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution
"We are, at this very moment, passing through an age of transition.
The Age of industry; the age of oil, electricity, and the atom; the age of the machine, of huge collectivities, and of science-the future will decide what is the best name to describe the era we are entering. The word matters little. What does matter is that we should be told that, at the cost of what we are enduring, life is taking a step, in us and in our environment. After the long maturation that has steadily going on during the apparent immobility of the agricultural studies, the hour has came at last, characterized by the birth pangs inevitable in another change of state. These were the first men - those who witnessed our origin. There are others who will witness the great scenes of the end. To us, falls the honor and good fortune of coinciding with a critical change in the noosphere.
In these confused and restless zones in which the present blends with the future in a world of upheaval, we must stand face to face with all the grandeur, the unprecendented grandeur, of the phenomenon of man. Here if anywhere, now if ever, have we, more legitimately than any of our philosophers, the right to think that we can measure the importance and detect the direction of the process of hominisation. Let us look carefully and try to understand. And to do so let us probe beneath the surface and try to decipher the particular form of mind which is coming to birth in the womb of the earth today.
Our earth of factory chimneys and offices, seething with work and business, our earth with a hundred new radiations - this great organism lives, in final analysis, because of and for the sake of, a new soul. Beneath the change of age lies a change of thought. Where we are to look at it, where we are to situate this renovating and subtle alteration which, without appreciably change our bodies, has made new creatures of us? In one place and one only - in the new intuition involving the total change in the physiognomy of the universe in which we move - in other words, in an awakening.
What has made us in four or five generations (in spite of all that may be said), so ambitious too, and so worried, is not merely that we have discovered and mastered other forces of nature. In final analysis it is, if I am not mistaken, that we have become conscious of the movement which is carrying us along, and have thereby realised the formidable problems set us by this reflective exercise of the human effort."
from The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin
noosphere: the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution
"We are, at this very moment, passing through an age of transition.
The Age of industry; the age of oil, electricity, and the atom; the age of the machine, of huge collectivities, and of science-the future will decide what is the best name to describe the era we are entering. The word matters little. What does matter is that we should be told that, at the cost of what we are enduring, life is taking a step, in us and in our environment. After the long maturation that has steadily going on during the apparent immobility of the agricultural studies, the hour has came at last, characterized by the birth pangs inevitable in another change of state. These were the first men - those who witnessed our origin. There are others who will witness the great scenes of the end. To us, falls the honor and good fortune of coinciding with a critical change in the noosphere.
In these confused and restless zones in which the present blends with the future in a world of upheaval, we must stand face to face with all the grandeur, the unprecendented grandeur, of the phenomenon of man. Here if anywhere, now if ever, have we, more legitimately than any of our philosophers, the right to think that we can measure the importance and detect the direction of the process of hominisation. Let us look carefully and try to understand. And to do so let us probe beneath the surface and try to decipher the particular form of mind which is coming to birth in the womb of the earth today.
Our earth of factory chimneys and offices, seething with work and business, our earth with a hundred new radiations - this great organism lives, in final analysis, because of and for the sake of, a new soul. Beneath the change of age lies a change of thought. Where we are to look at it, where we are to situate this renovating and subtle alteration which, without appreciably change our bodies, has made new creatures of us? In one place and one only - in the new intuition involving the total change in the physiognomy of the universe in which we move - in other words, in an awakening.
What has made us in four or five generations (in spite of all that may be said), so ambitious too, and so worried, is not merely that we have discovered and mastered other forces of nature. In final analysis it is, if I am not mistaken, that we have become conscious of the movement which is carrying us along, and have thereby realised the formidable problems set us by this reflective exercise of the human effort."
from The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home