AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 4:21 am
JLPratt wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 4:04 am
To add to the above submission, if you haven't already, you might also want to consider Teilhard de Chardin, of course another French scientist. In
The Phenomenon of Man, he discusses evolution within his idealist vision. With respect to Lamarck and Darwin, in Chapter 3 "Demeter" he footnotes:
In various quarters I shall be accused of showing too Lamarckian a bent in the explanations which follow, of giving an exaggerated influence to the Within in the organic arrangement of bodies. But be pleased to remember that, in the 'morphogenetic' action of instinct as here understood, an essential part is left to the Darwinian play of external forces and to chance. It is only really through strokes of chance that life proceeds, but strokes of chance which are recognized and grasped--that is to say, psychically selected. Properly understood the 'anti-chance' of the Neo-Lamarckian is not the mere negation of Darwinian chance. On the contrary it appears as its utilization. There is a functional complementariness between the two factors; we could call it 'symbiosis.'
In the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin, might even the Genesis creation myth be an archetypal if not pragmatic account of transmutation, with Adam and Eve representing human beings, the species with special dominion and in the image and likeness of God? Paralleling Genesis, the Daoist classics written down in the same age as Genesis emphasize not only the special position of human beings (see again,
Zhuangzi, Chapter 18), but also the layered relationship among God (Dao), Heaven, Earth, and Humankind (see, e.g.,
Dao De Jing, Chapter 25). On the one hand, it's remarkable how similar the accounts are; on the other hand, perhaps an idealist account could not be any other way?
Great quote! I also mention Teilhard de Chardin in Part 2,
Incarnating the Christ. We should remember mythology is always taken from sense-perceptible phenomenon. In that sense, the literalists who say Genesis is an accurate account of what actually happened are correct, but they have no idea why they are correct. It is precisely because what we now call "psychic" was also 'externally'
perceived in that epoch. It has become so abstract for us we can scarcely imagine how such psychic processes would appear to them. Creation accounts such as those in Genesis 3 are always related to the descent of Spirit into 'material' world to the extent that there develops awareness of the ego-self - "
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked."
It is about the "knowledge of good and evil", because once we know that our various bodies are vulnerable in certain ways, we also know that other people share those vulnerabilities. None of that is at odds with the natural evolutionary account, as Teilhard de Chardin indicates, only with the materialist evolutionary account which only focuses on outer forms and not on the "
Within in the organic arrangement of bodies". Self-aware consciousness truly becomes the dominant selection 'mechanism', although "mechanism" is not a great term because it implies mechanical procedure rather than organic fluidity of the
Spirit. Similarly "evolution" carries much materialist baggage, hence the substitution for "
Metamorphoses".
Good observations, AshvinP. Bernardo in a podcast also talked about how "the knowledge of good and evil" is related to descent and dissociation. Again, paralleling Genesis, the
Dao De Jing's second chapter talks about a dissent into "the knowledge of good and evil," though translations of the text often obscure this point.
In the Judeo-Christian context, does this descent represent a quasi-absolute descent into contradiction or merely the possibility of a descent into a contradiction-of-opposites logic, along of course with an over-identification with the separate self and certain pride? In other words, is humankind necessarily fallen or is this descent only one possibility of everyday existence?
If the latter, is a misguided relic of such a descent the false duality of even the metaphorical versus the literal? As you point out, the literalists are in some respects right about Genesis. Unfortunately, however, the literalists themselves are stuck in polarized thinking--they normally don't think Genesis is metaphorical. And of course they don't think any sort of elevated state is possible in ordinary life, albeit for a few saintly people.
Then, could the solution to this conundrum--as in an ordinary "ascent," or return to an ideal, harmonious day-to-day state--be to use complementarity-of-opposites thinking and terminology? Instead of "metaphorical versus literal," would it better to use, "archetypal and practical" or "archetypal and pragmatic"? The Daoist texts often go one step further, juxtaposing everyday concepts like "action," "name," and "form" simply with "emptiness."
Finally, could most people, whether of a scientific or religious inclination, appreciate this complementarity, as opposed to recognizing wholeness and unity as something that simply transcends an otherwise contradictory world,
a la Hegel, for example? If idealists now want to move society or even accord with idealism in their own lives, do we need a subtle shift in logic, from say the Aristotelian dialectic to the YinYang?
As far as how this point relates to the evolution of human life, Teilhard de Chardin following a long line of Christian thinkers was bridging the ideal as in religion and the real as in science, seeing the two aspects as necessarily complementary. He lived and worked in China for long spans, but did not think Chinese culture had influenced his own thinking very much (and indeed, it need not have). In any case, his ideas are very much in line with traditional Chinese thinking.