The Slavophile Russian Cosmists: Reds, Scientists and Mystics

by Bruce Lerro
Perspectives

 “This beautiful Earth is no more than a brief resting place between the sea of salt where we were born and the sea of stars which we must now. venture forth”
—-Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the Future

Orientation

In cross-cultural psychology, the major world divisions are between the West and the East. But what about Russia? Is it closer culturally to Europe or to China and India? As you will find out in this article, the answer is neither.

Absence of a bourgeois spirit, specialization, rationalism or empiricism in Russia

For political and economic reasons, I disagree with Nicholas Berdyaev’s characterization of the Russian “soul” as conflicted spiritually between Dionysian paganism and ascetism or politically between anarchism and despotism. However, what Berdyaev is right about is that Russians are not bourgeois. For Russian thinkers, individual freedom often seems more like a willful license than genuine freedom. In addition, there are two other Western tendencies which have never taken hold in Russia. One is a disembodied transcendental spirituality. Those “cosmists” (to be defined shortly) like Nikolai Fedorov insisted his spirituality include a technological dimension such as the colonization of the planets. At the same time, epistemologically neither philosophical schools such as dry-as-dust rationalism nor bean-counting empiricism ever seriously took hold in Russian philosophy as they did in the West.

Culturally there was the battle between the Slavophiles who emphasized what Russia could teach the West about say, the communal life of peasants. Then there were the Enlighted liberals like Belinsky and Herzen-who tried to show what Russia could learn from the West. The Slavophiles essentially won. This can be seen in the minority status of liberalism throughout Russia’s 19^th century, the early 20^th century, throughout the Soviet period and even after.

For example, Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov (1912-1992) argued that Russia’s future as an international power lay not in emulating the Western European and Atlantic powers, but in gathering and uniting the “passionarity” of the steppe peoples in the East.

Young in his book The Russian Cosmists tells us Gumilyov’s views have been a major influence on the neo-Eurasian cultural and political movement prominent since the breakdown of the Soviet Union. He is a source for Russian neo-nationalist thought. Capitalism never got a foothold in Russia except when Russia was invaded by Mordor’s free market fundamentalists after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

What is Russian cosmism?

According to Berdyaev, Russians are preoccupied with eschatology – the kingdom at the end of history. Cosmists were not convinced that we were fixed in present evolutionary time. We can slide backwards in evolution at the change of the moon or setting of the sun. According to Young, tales of vampires and werewolves have haunted Slavic lands at least since the time of Herodotus.

According to George M. Young, Russian cosmism is a blend of political activist speculation, futuristic religious science and utopian outer space colonization. It includes the following assumptions and motives:

• Active evolution: the present humanity is not the end point;
• The exploration of the cosmos;
• A belief in the existence of astral forces;
• Inclusion of premodern bodies of knowledge like astrology, alchemy and the kabbalah as valuable sources of knowledge;
• A belief that leading scientists should be involved in the human future
• Belief in unlimited extension of human physical longevity;
• Humanity bears the responsibility for our future development on this planet;
• The existence of a planetary envelope, the noosphere on top of Vernadsky’s biosphere and lithosphere.

Let’s take the example of Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) who developed his own version of spiritual Darwinism. He argued there were three stages in the development of humanity:

• Telluric earthbound man who is confined to this planet. He is a captive of gravity and the senses. Sukhovo-Ko claims the practice of “unkinship” is the present state of the world. As fallen humanity we are now natures slaves.
• Our common task is to become nature’s master. When we do, we become Solar man, inhabiting or solar system.
• Sidereal man – inhabiting all worlds in the universe.

 He thought that the further we evolve, the smaller our bodies should become.

Individual commonalities among the cosmists

The cosmists were interdisciplinary, self-educated and they spoke many languages. They were optimistic when compared to the gloom-and-doom  that has enveloped the West throughout the 20^th century. They included mystic Nikolai Fedorov, who had explored the territory between science and magic; the mystical poet Vladimir Solovyov; rocket scientist pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and geochemist VD Vernadsky. One man, Florensky, was called the Russian Leonardo. He was a groundbreaking mathematician, inventor, aestheticist, an electric engineer and social worker. He wrote a visionary book called The Pillar and the Ground of Truth.

Cosmists’ stormy  Relationship with the Soviet Union

Cosmists were very aware of the Russianness of their ideas and activities. They sensed that their best work would not and could not have been done elsewhere. During the Soviet period the religious cosmists worked in exile like Berdyaev and Bulgakov. Others sharing unorthodox political and economic views were restricted, suppressed and eventually liquidated including Florensky, Bogdanov, Gorky, Setnitsky and Muravyov. The scientific cosmists like Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky Chizhevsky and Kuprevich were honored in their fields, provided their work did not contradict dialectical materialism. It wasn’t until the 1980s that hidden works from previous periods came out.

A Sampling of Science Fiction Writers, Mystics and Philosophers

The Place of Theosophy and mediumship

Young tells us that even the early Soviet prominent officials, self-proclaimed atheists and materialists showed great interest in studies associated with the occult. For example, Gorky was interested in thought transference and the film-maker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a Rosicrucian initiate. For Scriabin and Kandinsky, occult philosophy was a lifetime pursuit that impinged on all aspects of their personal, spiritual and creative lives.

Many of you who have heard of Theosophy may dismiss it as the wild ravings of Madam Blavatsky about cycles of previous races and lost civilizations. In the Anglo-American world of transcendental spiritualism, Theosophy might seem to be the opposite of radical political activity.  But in the Russian Silver Age, Mary Carlson says most educated readers had some acquaintance with spiritualism and Theosophy. Theosophy also claimed that present humanity is not the most advanced in history and vanished races of humanity, Atlantean and Lemurian were physically, mentally and spiritually superior to us.

Theosophists were not insensitive to human suffering. Theosophists were active in mending the clothing of soldiers during World War I  and Annie Besant was a socialist. Some of the principles of theosophy could be interpreted socialistically. Here are four of its characteristics:

• Spirituality could be divided into exoteric and esoteric. Exoteric religion is religions for the masses based on superstition and controlled by religious elites. Esoteric religion is the core teaching of all the world religions which are only known to a few wise people who have no control over the masses.
• It is universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caster or color.
• It is the comparative study of religion, philosophy and science.
• To investigate the unexplained laws of nature along with the power latent in humanity to tap into the paranormal.

When Marx talked about religion as the opiate of the people, it is directly connected to exoteric religion. Esoteric spirituality’s criticism of priests would have warmed Marx’s heart. The second principle of universal brotherhood was a challenge to racial, religious and sexual hierarchies. Marxists would support that. Thirdly, the fact that the comparative study of religion and philosophy included science would have made room for skepticism about religion that Marxists would favor.

TGPai-Astros

Russian Scientists

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)

Young called Tsiolkovsky an unpretentious self-made genius. According to Young, he arrived in Moscow from a provincial village in 1873 with no money or friends,  minimum education and was nearly deaf from childhood after a bout of scarlet fever. He visited the library where Fedorov worked every day and joined a group of followers. Fedorov was his ideal teacher spending hours with him discussing his own studies. Fedorov directed his studies towards math, physics and chemistry. Tsiolkovsky was very interested in space travel after studying Jules Verne. He dreamed of an eternal striving outward of humanity to the sun which would allow humanity to be released from the chains of gravity. He began to make rocket boats, rocket wagons and rocket powered spaceships. He wrote narratives about traveling beyond earth by rocket ship and developed mathematical formulas that would make some of his fantasies possible.

Tsiolkovsky wrote papers that would eventually lay the foundation for the 1957 launching of Sputnik. We are informed by Young that his work contained the embryo of nearly all the scientific-technological attainments of the Soviet Union in the exploration of space.  He was able to determine most of the things necessary to make, launch and sustain life inside rockets as we now know them. He also calculated the amount of fuel needed to overcome the earths gravitational pull. Finally, he popularized space exploration with a number of long and short science fiction articles that drew Russian scientists into the field of colonizing the cosmos. Today The Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics sponsors conferences containing 12 sections with people from Russia, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas attending.

Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945)

Vernadsky was well-read in the literature of the world’s religions and in Eastern and Western philosophy. He felt closest to the ancient Greek hylozoic pantheism which finds life in all matter. He read Darwin in English when he was seventeen and mastered fifteen languages. He also read widely in history and world literature.

His main breakthrough was to demonstrate the role of living matter – humans, animals and plants – in the transfer of solar energy into mineral matter. He claimed that life not only evolves from hard mineral matter but in the process of disintegrating over eons contributes to the creation of new matter. With the emergence of the noosphere in human societies in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, mankind becomes a geological force. It was as part of the noosphere that would guide humanity in a gradual but inevitable evolution. He says that two billion years ago plants containing calcium emerged from the world of minerals. Five hundred thousand years ago, animals with calcium skeletons began to emerge. This development of calcium within living matter was one of the major stages in the geological history of the biosphere. Young says that though Vernadsky is relatively unknown around the world  today, in time he will be considered the equal of Newton, Darwin and Einstein.

Pavel Florensky (1882-1937): the Russian Leonardo

Florensky was called the Russian Leonardo and made major contributions to mathematics, physics, electrodynamics, folklore, philology, marine botany, art history and theory, earth science, and philosophy. He was also a master theorist of avantgarde art contributing to the mathematical, philosophical and theological revolution that was taking place in all the arts from realist to symbolist literature.

In Pillar and the Ground of Truth Florensky explores concepts and images of Sophia the way we experience her as a hint of the heavenly city to be built – the world soul come to earth. He proved to be of major assistance to Lenin in his efforts to electrify Russia. He wrote to Vernadsky in 1929 concerning the biosphere becoming a noosphere or planet of thought. He suggests that interpenetrating the biosphere is what he would all the “pneumatosphere” a sphere of spirit and culture intimately related to, affecting and being affected by the rest of the biosphere. The nephew of Solovyov once remarked that Florensky looks as if he had already lived a thousand years.

Alexander Chizhevsky (1897- 1964)

Like most cosmists he was interdisciplinary, acquiring great skill in music, poetry and painting. He produced hundreds of accomplished impressionist oil paintings, and water colors. Later with friends he went on archeological expeditions in Greece and Egypt.

He had increased humanities’ ability to anticipate changes in the weather. While Tsiolkovsky wanted to know how we can affect the cosmos, Chizhevsky wanted to know how the cosmos affects us and how we are subjected to the laws of nature. His life work would be the study of solar and cosmic influences on human behavior. He was called) Leonardo of the 20^th century with discoveries in aeroionization – air purifiers; heliobiology – the effects of solar pulsation on human life and hemodynamics which sheds new light in the circulating of blood through living bodies.

He writes as an uncompromising determinist. Everything of culture and the psyche consists of physiochemical and neurological interactions. Our blood flows with the veins of the cosmos and our heart beats with the pulse of the cosmos. Tsiolkovsky became his mentor and supporter of his publications.

The power of electricity in history

Chizhevsky argued that it is the principle of electricity that affects both culture and history. The power of electrons is to combine, attract and find larger units of matter and energy. Gravity magnetism, spacetime and matter-energy are all electronic. For Chizhevsky, the sun’s influence on the biosphere, including human behavior, is a matter of the transfer of electrons. The discovery that patterns of solar activity – sun storms, and sun stops – coincide with patterns of mass human behavior such as wars, revolutions and epidemics. He calls this new science historiometry. 

Reds on Earth: From the Biosphere to the Noosphere

Animal species activity

Like all other animals, we humans have to earn a living in the environment in order to meet our needs. Each species has a specific activity, a “species activity” unique to itself by which adaptation is accomplished (for example, building dams is the species activity of beavers). All animals work – i.e., they expend energy in a focused way over time in order to survive and reproduce. But the overwhelming majority of animals do not deliberately cooperate with other members of their own species, except in the case of mammals in caring for their young. They complete all processes of work essentially alone. The simple biological strategy of most other animals is to graze, forage, or chase down prey in solitude. Humans, considered in isolation, without society or culture, and relying only on physical prowess, are mediocre competitors to other large-bodied mammals. Other animals can run faster, jump higher, and have greater sensory acuity.

Human species activity is cooperative

It is our social strategies that have made us the dominant large-bodied species on this planet, and these social strategies entail cooperation. It is our ability to cooperate with other human beings that gives us the edge over the rest of the animal kingdom. We cooperate by (a) pooling our resources, (b) creating a division of labor, and (c) working to a common end. Cooperation creates a social whole which is more than the sum of any individual. Human societies emerged as an adaptive strategy of homo sapiens to compensate for our physiological mediocrity. But society does far more than help us to survive and reproduce. Society is responsible for completing our humanization and expanding it over the course of history.

Cooperation changes human species-activity from work to labor. In laboring, we accept roles in a division of labor. Members of a hunting band agree beforehand that some will join together to frighten the game, while others will wait in ambush. Later, if they have been suc­cessful, they will share the kill with other members of the band who have stayed behind at the campsite. After all is done and they have finished consuming the edible parts of their prey, those members who did not participate in the hunt are expected to engage in other roles, such as sewing the carcass and tanning the leather of the animal.

The planetary noosphere is historical

For most of human history there was no noosphere. But in the last two centuries, our species has built a network of social institutions that reflect on each other (what Chardin called centrapedalization) around the Earth that changes, and is changed by, our biophysical environment. Society becomes akin to what Teilhard de Chardin termed a “noosphere”—a “super-organic” planetary feedback system, a “socio-sphere” nested within the biosphere. A look from outer space would show the noosphere concentrated in cities. Chardin poetically compared the system of cities of communication with electric power links and tied the circulation and electric power lines with the circulation of the nervous system.

It is within this socio-sphere (noosphere) that history takes shape. The dynamics taking place among other animals within the biosphere over time could be called “evolution.” “History” is a unique kind of irreversible and accumulating evolutionary activity that goes with the building of the noosphere. Without a noosphere there would be no history. With the few exceptions of those other animals that have some socio-culture, the human species is the only species on earth that produces history. History consists of socio-cultural systems changing over time.

Summing up:

Non-human animals                  Human beings

         work                                             labor

         little or no cooperation             cooperation: social roles

         biological evolution                   socio-cultural evolution

         evolution without history         evolution with history

Human practice is the accumulating irreversible, recurring and conflicted process by which collective humanity intervenes in the biosphere, noosphere and history for the purposes of satisfying needs and wants. It is conflicted because it is both intentional and unintentional and because there are class struggles over the form and content of the intervention.

Mystics and mechanical materialists

There are at least three ways of understanding the relationship between the biosphere, the mind, the noosphere and the spiritual world. Mystics say that biosphere, mind and noosphere are all creatures of a spiritual world. The epistemological framework for mystics is with the relationship between a spiritual world and an individual. At the other extreme for mechanical materialists, the relationship is between the biosphere and the biological individual. They ignore the mind and the noosphere. Where mystics and mechanical materialists differ is in the ultimate nature of objective reality. For mystics the ultimate reality is the spiritual world. For mechanical materialists it is biophysical nature. But they agree that subjectivity begins with the individual. 

The place and misplace of mind in socio-historical psychology

For Vygotsky and the sociohistorical school, in between the biophysical world and the individual mind is a sociohistorical noosphere layer of reality. It is sociohistorical objectivity of human practice which engages in an expanding feedback loop with the biosphere. Individual subjectivity emerges from and interacts with the historical-social layer of reality. The individual mind does not engage the biosphere directly, only indirectly. The individual mind does not even become a human mind until it is socialized and historicized. For dialectical materialists like Vygotsky, the human mind is created out of a socio-historical network of institutions from birth to death. Vygotsky, Leontiev and Luria claimed that psychological skills first originate through structural, meaningful, cooperative, and recurring forms of labor.

The main function of the mind is externally, not internally, driven. Primarily, the human mind is concerned with the collective engagement of transforming external objects through the laboring process in order to satisfy basic needs. Introspection or self-reflection is the second stage of this process, but it is not the main focus as it is with idealist mysticism. For dialectical materialists the human mind is a function, not a substance (as it is for mystics) of highly organized material bodies – human beings. To say that the human mind is inseparable from society and history is not to say that other animals do not have minds. What it does mean is that without intense social life and verbal language, animal  minds are mostly imprisoned in the present. It is the socialization and historization of homo sapiens that is responsible for making the mind a human mind.

From brains to minds

Before the emergence of the human mind, internality had an origin in matter, specifically the brain. The brain is adaptive responsive to a rapidly changing biosphere where instinct was a less and less reliable resource. There are non-social creatures without brains that have no mind. With the emergence of a central nervous systems, animals developed brains. But is only when animals have a social life and brains, that pre-human minds appear. To be sure, nature was physical, chemical and biological before the brain or the mind appeared. So, the mind is first a product of material nature (the brain) and later through the social and historical practice of human beings, the mind emerges. Then the mind becomes a coproducer through society and history with nature. For materialists, there is no mind beyond nature, society or history. A dialectical materialist, unlike a mechanical materialist does not reduce the mind to the brain. While the brain is a necessary condition for the mind, once the mind emerges through its building of a socio-historic layer of nature, mind becomes more than the brain. With this foundation in place let us return to the cosmists.

God builders and biocosmists

Marxist intellectuals and future Soviet officials including Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky wanted to redirect the religious character and spiritual energy to the Russian revolution. Gorky says that mysticism and science are not incompatible. They wanted to create a new Adam for a new Eden. In Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the character Bazarov contended that nature was not a temple but a laboratory. These “God Builders” wanted to combine non-Euclidean math, subatomic particles and depth psychology. In the arts they wanted to follow Wagner to unite all the arts into a single great pageant. Alexander Bogdanov was a physician, an experimental scientist and a science fiction writer who wrote Red Star which was published in 1908. His major philosophical work was Tektology— which he called the science of organization. It anticipated the work in Western Europe on general systems theory and cybernetics.

Valerian Muraviev (1885-1932) was as much an alchemist as a Marxist.  He hoped for a total alchemical transformation of the individual and the cosmos. He wrote a book called Control Over Time to parallel the discoveries of Einstein.  Muraviev wanted to investigate time, not in a lab but in history and society based on the Russian experience of the revolution and the total reorganization of society. He said it is the collective, not the isolated individual that is the shaper and director of humanity.

Valerian said there are two kinds of time:

• Inner time – the realm of freedom—under the control of the individual
• External time – the realm of necessity

The goal of the collective is to expand their control over the whole universe along  with death. Soviet scientists and scholars are to be the guiding force for the common task in science. Valerian said we must create a population of supermen who overcome time. By contrast, bourgeois society focuses on individualcreativity which is the representative of a world-view of commercial interests. This creative industry presently creates objects, not for overcoming time but for passing time.

For the biocosmists the time had come to inhabit outer space and to bring life to all the inhabitants. They viewed the struggle against death as a logical continuation of the revolution’s struggle against bourgeois culture. They agreed with Fedorov that death was not inevitable. 

How Reds Would Explore the Cosmos: The Cosmic Extension of the Noosphere

Beyond technological determinism and humanism

The noosphere could become not merely the realm of interaction between society and the biosphere but rather the interaction between all cosmic civilizations and the rest of the universe. In their book The Universe and Civilization, Sevastaynov, Ursul and Shkolenko lay out what a communist practice would be like in space exploration. When it comes to the exploration of outer space there is a Flatland duality to overcome between the technicist conception which regards the astronautical as a panacea for all the difficulties and hardships of social development. The opposite is romantic humanist whose supporters reject the needs for the development of an astronautic society and insist the focus to be only with man’s earthly problems.

For communists the exploration of outer space is not a stage in the natural evolution of living matter on earth. Rather It is a new stage in social history. The space age is an explosion-like extension into infinity of man’s sphere of practical-critical activity on earth. To one degree or another, the cosmos has influenced and continues to influence the development of mankind and the outer terrestrial environment. But now that applied astronautics has emerged, society is beginning to affect the nature of the cosmos.

Realms of space exploration

The authors say space exploration is now going on in the following fields:

• Immediate vicinity of near space – the higher layers of the earth’s atmosphere, the ionosphere, the radiation belts and of outer space. This is accomplished though the help of astronomic instruments placed above the atmosphere (extra-atmospheric astronomy).
• Processes are being studied that are artificially created in outer space by the human species. These include technological devices in flight like growing crystals in weightlessness. Others include medical and biological research done directly in flight or on objects placed in spacecraft.
• Explorations of Earth from outer space such as meteorological observations and the study of natural resources and aquatic regions.

Should we try to faithfully reproduce terrestrial conditions in space? “No!” say Sevastaynov, Ursul and Shkolenko. The essence of creative humanity consists precisely of the  ability of humans to change both of our  external and internal nature in any direction we choose. They say:

the construction of cities, excavation of natural deposits, and utilization of underground space for communication may well be characterized as redistribution of the planets’ mass transfer of matter into surrounding space, creation of a porous planet. (97)

This tendency is what Buckminster Fuller called euhemerization – doing more with less.

Cosmicization of human practical critical activity

As human practice extends beyond the terrestrial realm there are new processes to consider. Now the conditions and objects of activity may be both terrestrial and cosmic. The range begins at one extreme with terrestrial objects under terrestrial conditions. At the other are extreme cosmic objects under cosmic conditions. Here are the steps in between.

 Here are the full fifteen steps:

1. The terrestrial subject studies terrestrial objects under terrestrial conditions using terrestrial instruments
2. Terrestrial subject studies the effect of cosmic conditions on terrestrial objects with the aid of terrestrial instruments. How solar processes affect physical, chemical and biological objects on the Earth (the sun, conscious utilization of cosmic conditions in terrestrial production)
3. Terrestrial subject uses terrestrial instruments of cognition for studying cosmic objects reaching the earth in a natural way (meteorites and cosmic radiations)
4. Terrestrial subjects studying terrestrial objects under terrestrial conditions with the help of space instruments (rocket technology and automatic stations for exploring the earth)
5. Terrestrial subject studies cosmic objects under cosmic conditions using terrestrial technical instruments of cognition (astronomy)
6. Although the core of practice is humanity’s affect on objects of cognition and results in changes in these objects, nothing of the kind takes place in the case of astronomic observation. The object of cognition astronomy here affects the subject.
7. Terrestrial subject uses terrestrial instruments of cognition for studying cosmic objects reaching the earth with the aid of spacecraft
8. The subject undergoing cosmicization uses space instruments for observing terrestrial objects and conditions (permanent orbital stations)
9. Unmanned recent devices transport cosmic and raw materials and instruments of labor to earth
10. Automatic cosmic implements are used to process cosmic objects under cosmic conditions for production on celestial bodies and in satellites orbiting earth
11. The subject undergoing cosmicization uses space instruments of cognition for observing terrestrial objects and conditions
12. The subject undergoing cosmicization studies the behavior of terrestrial objects under space conditions with the aid of cosmic instruments
13. The space environment and the conditions of space flight have specific features – weightlessness, vacuum, radiation. There is a need to study living beings under these conditions.
14. 13) The subject undergoing cosmicization uses cosmic instrument on cosmic objects in his study of the possibility of creating terrestrial conditions (conditions similar to terrestrial ones are created for astronaut on spaceships) This task also arises in the construction of inhabit bases on the Moon and the planets
15. The highest achievement in science is that the subject who undergoes cosmicization studies cosmic objects under cosmic conditions with the aid of cosmic instruments.

Conclusion

This article begins by arguing Russia is different from the West philosophically in its rejection of both empiricism and rationalism. In addition, economically it has consistently rejected capitalism even when not in its Soviet phase. Politically it has said no to liberalism, and lastly Russians have turned their backs on Western transcendental religions. Next, I have defined Russian cosmism as having eight characteristics. I close the last part of the first section by naming the personal traits these cosmologists have in common, including their multilingual, self-educated, interdisciplinary and optimistic approach. They included mystics, poets, rocket scientists, geochemists, mathematicians, inventors and engineers.

In the second half of the article, I gave a sample of specific cosmists who were science fiction writers, mystics and philosophers including the interest of some in Theosophy.

Next I turned to the cosmitism of four scientists: Tsiolkovsky; Vernadsky; Florensky, Chizhevsky and their various fields of study.

In the last third of the article I turned to a communist theory of how the earth is becoming  a new layer of evolution called the “noosphere”. I closed the article with a visionary description of how communist theory of the noosphere on earth can be extended into the spreading of noospheres to other planets.