…NOR FINALITY…

Stage 53 / Thursday 18 June / From Logroño to Sotès / 20 km

 

One vineyard after the other: I am in the midst of the province of Rioja, and this province is indisputably pro …wine! If what gives meaning to my life is truly my quest for the meaning of life, I’m afraid I’ve again bumped into one of these sterile self-referential affirmations. As if, having ventured between two rows of vine stocks, I were trying to get out at the end, and see myself bumping into … more rows of vine stocks! A labyrinth? I must find the end, and that leads me to try and break this misleading quest by the concept of finality.

 

Finality … finality … you are truly not so simple! Already not simple was our quest for the origin of all things. Now, concerning man, Louis Massignon (1883-1962), this pioneer in the relationship between Christianity and Islam, and who considered Gandhi a saint, said: “Our finality is more than our origin!” Then you can imagine how long my notes on this subject could be, even if the stage today should be relatively short in kilometers …

 

Let’s begin simply. Is there finality to flowing water? Yes, it always flows toward a lower point: first a trickle, then a stream, a torrent, a tributary, finally a long quiet river, and it will finish in the immense distant ocean, far off, connected to all the others. In the same way, I could speak of the finality of the heat which dissipates unceasingly toward the cold! And from there, dream of a glacial universe, in perpetual expansion it would seem. Not always glacial, it favors the appearance of new and very hot stars from matter invisible until now. Is this its purposeful finality? Let’s notice in passing that this expansion has favored the appearance of life, and that life has allowed the apparition of thought among human beings. Toward what are these appearances converging, what is their finality?

 

Little streams quickly make great rivers, I am already asking myself the question of the finality of the universe! But I haven’t yet tackled other aspects more troubling in this word. If the embryo carries in it all that its genes will allow it to become, and if in the end the embryo becomes man or woman, and if “Man or woman you shall not kill!” (6th commandment in Exodus, chapter 20, and Deuteronomy chapter 5, but also see the Penal Code, article 221-1), then the terrible question arises concerning abortion not punishable, and more and more accorded without reflection. Finality, here you are in rude testing!

 

This very painful question of the fate of embryos can be linked to the theme of François Truffaut’s beautiful historical film “The Wild Child.” It evokes the awakening to life of a child about 12 years old, deprived of all social relationships until then, behaving like an animal. Victor, discovered in the Aveyron in 1800, was patiently studied and humanized by Dr Jean Itard (1774-1838) who studied his behavior in detail.

 

I also think of “Ishi in Two Worlds,” the very moving book by Theodora Kroeber. The French translation by Jacques B. Hess was published in 1968 under the simple title Ishi (Terre Humaine/Poche. Presses Pocket.) It is the true story of the last “wild indian” in North America, rescued in 1911 as the last survivor of his massacred Yahi tribe, and entrusted to the protection of ethnologist Alfred Kroeber and the staff of the museum of anthropology in San Francisco. In both cases of Victor and Ishi, one discovers the finality of education and love extended regardless to another, despite all preconceived ideas!

 

The material universe invariably obeys the physical laws, but these laws do not constitute finality by themselves. Katmandu was destroyed this year by an earthquake obeying these laws, in this case those of the tectonic plates floating on magma and pushing each other. But faced with such catastrophes, to conclude that God does not exist, I believe is being too hasty. How could the tiny threads that we are grasp the finality of the cord?

 

If the finality of the universe were only the coming of humanity in a carnal form, one could certainly deny with good sense a god who would amuse himself in inventing humans in order to destroy them at will in the end. But if the threads of the cord knot themselves together in solidarity to bring help to the victims of such earthquakes, is there not a higher law in this, than that of the tectonics? A new law, that of mutual help, mediated by thought and presented as a whole superior to its parts. The threads, the cord, the connection which permits throwing the lifeline and saving lives! Beyond a universe a priori uniquely material and mineral, there begins to be established a more organic universe. It is a complex system capable of regulating itself, of modifying the inexorability of the physical consequences of the tectonics.

This organic universe can better defend, by thought carefully applied, the fragility of that which can be born, grow and multiply. We know more now about the human impact on the biosphere. But already in 1925 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had written in an essay published much later: “And this amounts to imagining, in one way or another, above the animal biosphere a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls (the noosphere, if you will).” (The vision of the past – Collins 1966 – page 63) [L’Hominisation. Introduction à une étude scientifique du Phénomène humain, dans Œuvres III, La vision du passé – Éditions du Seuil – pages 77-111].

 

This is a vision of a more generous finality in the appearance of the human being. Well beyond their capacity to kill each other, verifiable alas each day, this is the vision of a capacity to better communicate in order to better preserve. This noosphere, would it be in part Internet, Wikipedia and my ability to transfer electronically not only this virtual stage of my pilgrimage, but also to transfer into the account of a good friend, a doctor in Nepal, funds necessary to help care for these victims? It then makes such good sense, this neologism derived from the Greek words νοῦς (noüs, “spirit”) and σφαῖρα (sphaira, “sphere”), by lexical analogy with “atmosphere” and “biosphere”!

 

This perspective, globalizing the whole of the universe, and integrating the arrival of thought on the surface of the terrestrial globe where we are for the moment condemned to reside, gives hope. Is it itself the object of a spiritual finality as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) advances it in other writings? He was a man from the Society of Jesus: a priest, a Christian, a Catholic, a Jesuit, a Frenchman, a researcher, a paleontologist, a writer, a theologian and a philosopher. That’s a lot for one man …   Our Jesuit, who had a time of difficulties with his superiors in the area of the doctrine of original sin, saw an interesting process of convergence of evolution leading to an Omega point which would be that of the coming of the cosmic Christ (see the illustration by the Peruvian artist John M Kenedy Traverso.)   As for me, after picking here and there ideas along the path, and chiseled out the concept of finality with savage hammer blows, I progress toward Sotès. I’m not going to digress there, but rather divert myself … starting with one glass or two, of guess what? Rioja wine, of course !