Complexité-conscience
The law of complexity-consciousness is the axis of all Teilhard’s thought: the more matter organizes and grows complex, the more it interiorizes and becomes conscious. External complexity and internal consciousness are not two parallel phenomena but the two sides of the same movement—the coiling of the universe upon itself, from the very simple to the extremely intricate, bought at the price of a correlative rise in interiority.
cet enroulement particulier « de complexité » se trouvant expérimentalement lié à une augmentation corrélative d’intériorisation, c’est-à-dire de psyché ou conscience.
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Teilhard starts from an observation he considers empirical: as one ascends the ladder of life—from mineral to cell, from cell to brain—two magnitudes grow in tandem. Externally, complexity—not mere accumulation of parts, but the ever-tighter organization of ever more elements around a center. Internally, consciousness—interiority, what he calls the psyché. Where matter coils and concentrates, something begins to feel, then to know. A stone has almost no interior; a human has an abyss.
What Teilhard calls a law is the claim that this correlation is no late accident confined to the brain, but the very fabric of the universe from its origin. All matter has an inner face, infinitesimal at first, which expands with organization. Evolution is no longer a mere mechanical complication: it is a rising of the soul. The noosphere marks the threshold crossed on Earth—the moment when interiority, having become reflection, weaves its own web.
Complexity-consciousness ≠ a linear progression naïvely moving from worse to better: Teilhard describes an oriented ascent, costly, riddled with trial and error and failures, converging toward the Omega Point. And it ≠ complexity as defined by Morin: the latter crafts a principle for thought that connects without presuming any direction for the world; Teilhard, by contrast, makes increasing complexity the very arrow of the universe. One reshapes perception; the other orients the cosmos.