All that Rises

August 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Transcribed from HERE.

There’s a short story called ‘All that rises must converge’, by Flannery O’Conner and the title of this story is taken from Teilhard De Chardin, who was a Jesuit priest and paleontologist, albeit somewhat controversial in both areas. De Chardin was the guy who came up with the ‘Omega Point’ which is the theory that at some point in the future our evolution… it is a model of directed evolution or teleological evolution that we are somehow evolving toward some point at which we become singular and God-like. It is not a popular theory, and not a good theory, but it is interesting. This idea that he had that ‘all that rises must converge’, as well as being a beautiful phrase, but, I think is also quite interesting in relation to some of the ideas to do with the image schema of knowledge to do with our understanding of different types of knowledge, and a map of our epistemology being based on embodied experience, and in many cases that means visual experience, it is to do with visual awareness, visual consciousness of the world. What I have also mentioned is how various entailments of that schema, of that selection of metaphors map onto or organise our understanding of different types of knowledge and the different scales at which knowledge operates at etc. One I have spoken about before is the entailment of height, so when we want to indicate that we have access to greater knowledge we often use a height metaphor because elevated positions, be it the top of hills, in crow’s nests, standing on the shoulders of giants etc are the positions from which we can see more and tend to be metaphors which extend across so the position from which we know more tends to be an elevated position, in the ascendant. I think this idea that De Chardin is putting forward here, this idea that all that rises must converge is a related way of saying this. One imagines oneself rising into the air one also imagines oneself having access to greater and greater swathes of knowledge… I have this image in my mind of lots of people standing in this field where I am standing now and we all rise together, and as we rise our shared vision extends and it is almost as if we are moving together as these various planes in this field triangulate upwards. So the sense in which that all that rises must converge is a (very idiosyncratic) application of this spatial metaphor, and particularly the height entailment of it. That as one ascends one has access to greater knowledge; that the totality of knowledge becomes arrayed out underneath oneself and one becomes the focal point, the unique focal point from which one might view all of knowledge and if everyone was to go through a similar ascension process all would eventually arrive at that focal point, so there we would all be, all rising together, all converging on this unique focal point.

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