Planétisation
In Teilhard’s view, humanity coils in upon itself as peoples and civilizations, grown too numerous for the globe, meet and intermingle. Under the combined effect of contact, exchange, and the communion of minds, the human layer closes in a loop around the planet. This marks a stage in the noosphere’s ascent toward its center—not a mere flat expansion, but a convergence.
La double crise, déjà sérieusement amorcée, au Néolithique, et qui approche de son maximum sur la Terre moderne, elle tient d’abord, nous l’avons dit, à une Prise en masse (à une « planétisation », pourrait-on dire) de l’Humanité : Peuples et civilisations parvenus à un tel degré, soit de contact périphérique, soit d’interdépendance économique, soit de communion psychique, qu’ils ne peuvent plus croître qu’en s’interpénétrant.
The word appears in quotation marks, cautiously, like a discovery Teilhard barely allows himself. He describes what he elsewhere calls a “prise en masse”: humanity, having finished covering the surface of the globe, can no longer spread out—it has no choice but to turn inward upon itself. The contact between peoples, the interdependence of economies, the communion of minds wrap it into a single sheet that closes in on itself. Planétisation is the name for this enfolding.
The image is spherical, and the choice is no accident. On a closed surface, growth means convergence: the thicker the human sheet becomes, the closer its points draw together. Teilhard reads this as the final phase of the noosphere, the moment when thought, after germinating and expanding, begins to gather toward its focal point—the Omega Point. Planétisation is thus not a state but an operation, the gradual tightening of a single fabric of consciousness.
Planétisation ≠ globalization. The latter flattens a market and flows across the surface; it connects without interiorizing, adds without a center, and can expand indefinitely without ever unifying. Planétisation, by contrast, presupposes a rise in consciousness: not the extension of a network, but the interpenetration of interiors.
Planétisation ≠ the “global village” of media. Technical networks thicken exchanges without directing them; they bring nodes closer without making them converge. For Teilhard, proximity only makes sense when stretched toward a center—without this focal point, the enfolding unravels into mere agitation of the sheet.