(Re) Building the Earth
17
Mar
Chardin’s text, dated at the medium of his life in the 30´s and compiled and published
after 1958 (are several extracts), said only in Building the Earth, but there was still no strong environmental imbalance, the growth of atomic plants (nuclear energy was used in the war for bombs) and the danger of a global cataclysm, threats present today, in addition to social imbalance.
He already knew about the crisis of democracy and the growth of totalitarian systems (fascism and communism), defined his belief in the future in three ways: passion for the people, for the universal and for the future itself, and seeing the planet as an organism gave its sentence: “Each cell thinks, due to the fact that it is free, that it is authorized to erect a center for itself” (Chardin, 1958), however it verified the dispersion of this false intellectual and social liberalism.
See, however, the contradictions in dialogue, these forces do not have the “merely destructive power, each one of them contains positive factors… unless these components talk, each of them contains positive components… each of them is the world itself is the world itself that defends itself and wants to reach the light ”, of course it is necessary to avoid conflicts of wars and extremism.
In the sense it gives to the “spirit of the Earth”, it was written combining extracts from 1931, while traveling through the Pacific Ocean, defined this spirit as “the passionate sense of the common destiny that drags the thinking fraction of Life further and further away” , and it gives meaning to our conscience in growing circles of families, homelands, races, discover at last that the only true human unit, natural and real, is the Spirit of the Earth ”.
Edgar Morin in his book “Homeland” created a similar concept as planetary citizenship, but it is necessary to give a “common soul” to this idea of a planet as everyone’s home.
In Chardin’s cosmology, he works insistently on this theme in his Noosphere (this thinking layer that creates this spirit capable of involving everyone), he will say that “love is the most universal, the most formidable and the most mysterious of the cosmic energies”, today with so many poles and so many forces in conflict, it is necessary to rediscover this essential point of convergence.
On the path of unity, “to the wonders of a common soul”, he wrote “these brief and pale ones must make us understand that the formidable power of joy and action still lies within human unity”, to rediscover this value and this cosmic force, like the defines, it is our destiny.
To develop this thought in the rest of the book, he puts in the foreground: “to our concerns an organization and a systematic exploration of our universe understood as a true human homeland” and he will say in Beijing 1937 writing, what are the conditions of this human energy capable to direct “collective emotions” towards a common force, and capable of repelling the worst of the negative energies: war.
Chardin, T. (1958) Construire la Terre. Paris: Editions du Soleil.
