Every person imagines evolutionary time under the framework of a human lifespan. The earth was "born", and in its early stages it did not support life until it was stimulated by jolts of energy. Energy created the first pulsations of life like heartbeats and united simple monomers into molecules and eventually fully formed membranes. As the earth grew, it supported more complex organisms, organisms with specialized cells, that when aggregated together formed tissues and organs. From the human viewpoint this complexification might represent earth in its adult age. In other words, the maturity that lead the earth to produce humans, is perhaps the most mature age of our planet that we can conceive of.
However, what if evolutionary time is a concept outside of the human noosphere? A kind of time that does not rely on a beginning, middle, and end to describe itself but instead relies on spontaneous pulsations of energy? In "The Phenomenon of Man" Teillard also posits this question on page 99 when he states, "Matter seems dead. But could not the next pulsation be preparing slowly around us?" And indeed it could, because unlike the noticeable maturation of humans that occurs within decades, the noticeable "maturation" of evolutionary forces could take thousands of years. Furthermore, since the environment is still changing, largely due to forces of human destruction, it would follow that natural selection among organisms continues to take place, creating a noticeable change in their appearance.
From a biologist's perspective, Teillard's continuous "pulsations" can be described as what guides an organism through the evolutionary maze, whose avenues are created by changes in the environment. If an organism is presented with a dead end, it must adopt a characteristic that allows it to find another route to the finish line. Conversely, this alternate route may also allow the organism to shed unnecessary characteristics that the environment no longer demands of it. Accordingly, evolutionary biologists have used these pulsations to define the distinct eras of our evolutionary past. However, under Teillard's logic it would be plausible that these "eras" cannot be enclosed within our simple understanding of time, within years or decades or millenia. Instead, in order to understand the concept of evolutionary time, we cannot uphold the outsider's perspective which allows concrete definitions of time. We must immerse ourselves within the evolution of every being. We must recognize that further physical modifications of our body could be similar to other organisms responding to the same environment. This environment, that is simply responding to changes in chemistry and not to the duration of time.
It does seem evident that not only evolutionary time, but time itself as we conceive of it, has no part in the human noosphere. 'The movement of stars, the shape of mountains, the chemical nature of bodies-indeed all matter seemed to express a continual present.’(Teilhard, 217). We are unable to perceive the constant change, which as Teilhard posits, eternally reinforces the present. But it is perhaps more than an inability, to perceive a constant present, for we cannot conceive of a world without past, present, and future. Where does one fit into a world in which our experience is not marked by the linear passage of time?
ReplyDeleteIt seems that what Teilhard is driving at, is a two-fold problem. He states, regarding the example of boiling water, ‘By a tiny ‘tangential’ increase, the ‘radial’ was turned back on itself and so to speak took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed. But in depth, a great revolution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and representations;[..]’ (Teilhard, 169). So, Teilhard is pointing to a transformative moment in which all of a sudden the water boils, consciousness is born, and yet the molecules are jumping and moving all along; however, it is this constant movement that contributes to the continual present of which Teilhard writes earlier in the book. And so could we say that time is both a constant driving force that knows not the limitations of past and future, while at the same time it is the ‘one single stroke’ (Teilhard, 171) that halts time’s advance?