This is from the intro by Julian Huxley, p 16 in my Fontana edition, to Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard De Chardin. amazon
Père Teilhard was a strong visualiser. He saw with hie minds eye that ‘banal fact of the earth’s roundness’ the sphericity of man’s environment — was bound to cause this intensification of psychosocial
activity. In an unlimited environment , man’s thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outward: it would extend over a greater area, but would remain thinly spread. But when it is confined to the spreading over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organised web of thought, a noetic system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy.
It is all very well calling it energy but that is not quite it? I have a sense that the passage below (in an earlier post), where I talk about about Moreno’s sociometric matrix shows that the two were grappling with the same idea. Note that Moreno too saw this matrix as a return of God.
My hypothesis:
Moreno’s sociometric matrix, Chardin’s noosphere, McLuhan’s ‘audio space’, Jung’s ‘objective psyche’ are all ways of exploring cyberspace.
Here is a quote from Chardin, p 78 in my Fontana edition:
When I speak of the ‘within’ of the earth I do not of course mean those material depths in which — a few miles beneath our feet — lurks one of the most vexatious mysteries of science: the chemical nature and the exact physical condition of the internal region of the globe. The ‘within’ is used here … to denote the ‘psychic’ face of that portion of the stuff of the cosmos enclosed from the beginning of time within the scope of the early earth.
Chardin puts it a little differently from the sympathetic but less metaphysical Huxley.
So was the ‘psychic’ always there, or did it emerge with our activity?