Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre

French paleontologist, philosopher and theologian, for whom evolution offers the only prospect of
unveiling the meaning of the history of the World. His project – a cosmic philosophy – is to unravel
this meaning and define the purpose and place of the “human phenomenon”. In this work, for
example, we find a comparison between a flower and the human inflorescence, which transforms
and is transformed: “the vessels, the arrangements, and the very sap of the stem on which this
inflorescence is born” (p. 198). His attitude can be defined as a mix of descriptive,
phenomenalistic and idealist.
What perhaps interests Feldenkrais in this thinker’s conceptions is the idea of an equivalence between the size of an organism and certain movements, and also the idea of the contingency of life: existing forms are not the only possible ones, there is no positive finality to entelechy, but a movement within life, “trial and error”, a certain improbable totalization that gives life a certain possible grammar. According to him, evolutionary man is defined by the appearance of reflection: “cephalization” and “cerebralization”. In any case, Teilhard de Chardin’s thinking is very much alive in the presuppositions of the Feldenkrais Method – albeit with many nuances – that of a homology between the course of human development in the history of evolution and that of development on the scale of a human life, where changes are minute morphological novelties towards an increasingly refined or complex and self-aware organization:
For example, the human body is “bipedal, so that the hands can unburden the jaw of gripping, the maxillary muscles that imprison the skull can relax, the brain grows, the face diminishes, the eyes come closer and stare at what the hands pick up”. These minute modifications give the impression of an unbroken continuum, but they also make thought and language possible. On a human scale, there is a rigorous simultaneity between the body and reflection. For Teilhard de Chardin, what makes man the pinnacle of evolution is his self-consciousness, which enables him to direct himself and pursue cosmogenesis through a perfect union in which human beings, while developing their personalities, ultimately contribute to it.