April 4, 2024 – Teilhard and The ‘Spiritual’ Ground of Happiness
How can Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ help to reveal the ‘spiritual’ nature of human happiness?
Today’s Post
Last week we took a second look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution. We saw how Yuval Harari, in his book, Sapiens, suggested that we have “dug our own grave” due to our uniquely evolved human characteristic of ‘consciousness aware of itself’ Because of this, he concludes, our potential for true happiness is accordingly diminished. With this speculation, Harari sees the appearance of human consciousness as an ‘evolutionary mistake’, a mistake for which we must pay with an unavoidable existential unhappiness.
In looking at this further, we agreed that humans have indeed departed from the evolutionary ‘accommodation with environment’ delivered by ‘Natural Selection’ and assured by the instincts in our evolutionary predecessors. Perhaps our current state is indeed a result of this discontinuity, but as we saw, not necessarily the whole picture.
While disagreeing with Harari’s dystopic conclusion, we saw the merit in acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the instinctual bond enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’. But when looking through Teilhard’s evolutionary ‘lens’, such pain is not unexpected in the ‘rise of complexity’ embedded in the sap of the tree of evolution. From his perspective, all human advances, such as those documented in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, come about due to discomfort with the ‘status quo’. Any perfect, static serene accommodation with our environment would require absolute perfection of both ourselves and this environment. Even the simplest scientific understanding of reality shows this to be a fantasy in a universe whose most common feature is ‘constant change’.
Understanding the dynamic nature of existence, Patricia Albere, author of Evolutionary Relationships, sees the long history of rising universal complexity as suggesting that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.
This week we will look at a third facet of happiness; a look which involves such ‘paying of attention’. In doing so we will begin a look at happiness from the perspective of ‘spirituality.’
What is ‘Spirituality’?
As Teilhard addressed ‘spirituality’, the term is framed with apostrophes in recognition of the freight that this term carries with its religious overtones of ‘the supernatural’. It can reflect the eons of religious teaching which seemed to widen the gap between the ‘material’ lives we live and the ideal ‘spiritual’ life which lies far above us, attainable only in a ‘next’ life in which we are compensated for the pain experienced in this one.
A problem arises when we try to address the underlying agency of evolution, that which causes the universe to become more complex over time. What term do we use to discuss it? Teilhard used the term ‘complexification’, which certainly is accurate, but he also uses the term ‘spiritual’ as well. From his point of view, ‘spiritual’ simply refers to the agency which is present in all matter and causes it, over time, to organize itself into ever more complex arrangements. Paul Davies refers to it as the ‘software’ embedded in the ‘hardware’ of matter. Other scientists refer to it as simply the quanta of ‘information’ in every particle of matter by which it is ushered into connections which result in more complex configurations. An example of such an action can be seen in how the information contained in DNA guides RNA to produce the proteins necessary for the growth and functionality of the cell. Without such presence in all things, evolution would be unable to proceed and simply replicate itself endlessly at a static level of complexity. To Teilhard, therefore, ‘spiritual’ is ‘natural’, but only if the term ‘natural’ is understood in its widest, most universal, context.
We have seen several times how this concept can be found apart from religion. We have seen several times how Paul Davies, in his book, “The Cosmic Blueprint” understands universal evolution, including its extension into human life, to be underscored by increasing complexity.
But a less likely proponent of this position is Richard Dawkins, famous atheistic evolutionary biologist. Dawkins, in his anti-religious book, “The God Delusion” nonetheless suggests the idea of a “first cause of everything”. He suggests the viability of such a concept as the “basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”. In the next breath, he insists that “we must very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.” He is suggesting that there is clearly something afoot in universal evolution, but that it must be addressed from a secular perspective if we want to make sense of it.
As we have seen previously, Teilhard would have agreed at this level. His take on ‘spirituality’ also eschewed terms like ‘supernatural’, as he understood (as did Dawkins), such ‘process’ to lie in the plane of natural existence.
“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’. Nothing more; and also nothing less. Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”
Richard Dawkins’ concept offers yet another empirical insight into the issue of ‘information’ in human evolution. Like Teilhard, he recognizes the difference between evolution in society and as understood as ‘Natural Selection’ by biology. In his book, “The Selfish Gene”, he proposes that evolution continues through human society by way of ‘memes’, packets of cultural information, as the cultural parallel to biological genes. Such ‘memes’ are echoed in Teilhard’s concept of the ‘noosphere’, which is the body of human thoughts, ideas and inventions which accumulate in human lore, rituals, books, schools, and networks over time, and is thus ‘spiritual’ (by his definition) in nature.
By identifying spirit as phenomenal and affirming its existence as neither outside (epi) nor above (meta) nature, Teilhard is referring to science’s observation that the universe increases in complexity over the course of its evolution. This observation assumes that there is an agency, folded into matter, which assures the increase in complexity that marks every evolutionary step from energy to matter, simple matter to quarks, quarks to protons, protons to atoms to molecules to complex molecules to cells to neurons to brains to consciousness. As Jonathan Sacks observes, in each step the new evolutionary products display a collective complexity that is a property of the new product, not just aggregated properties of the individual products that comprise them.
Thus ‘spirituality’ is simply a word which refers to this tendency of ‘the stuff of the universe’ to ‘complexify over time’. As Teilhard goes on to say
“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us, it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”
Therefore, the acknowledgement of the existence of this ‘deeply rooted phenomenon in all things offers us a perspective on how our species fits into the sweep of evolution, even if it does so in a way different from the environmental ‘accommodation’ enjoyed by our predecessors. If, as Patricia Albere asserts, the ‘forces of evolution’ are such that they can, as they have done for fourteen billions of years, ‘optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity’ if we only begin to ‘listen’, then listening to the ‘voice’ of this ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in our lives can permit human life to be more harmoniously intertwined with our environment.
By Teilhard’s definition, therefore, ‘spirituality’ is indeed a third ground of ‘happiness’. Given his understanding of ‘spirituality’ as the term which refers to the underlying cause of the universal phenomenon of ‘complexification’, this suggests that some measure of our personal happiness is dependent on how well we listen to the ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in each of us. Patricia Albere suggests that such ‘listening’ can open us to the ‘optimization that can happen in our lives’. In simpler terms, we can trust the agency of universal evolution as it is in work in ourselves. But as Albere recons, we must first learn to ‘listen’ to it.
“Easier said than done”, goes the old adage. Humans may now represent the most advanced stage of evolution so far on this planet, but how in this stage do we find this spark so that we can indeed ‘listen’, and then how it is possible to make sense of what we hear and put it to use in life? Any success in either of these endeavors is certain to bring us into increased ‘accommodation’ with our environment, one in which we are better aligned with evolution and hence closer to our goal of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.
The Next Post
This week we began a look at a third facet of the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of ‘spirituality’. However, we took Teilhard’s understanding of this equally slippery term from his recognition of the agency of universal ‘complexification’.
Next week we will take another step in this exploration of ‘the spiritual’ facet of happiness, this time exploring our accumulated lore of such searching and deciding.