nikoilai fedorovich fedorov

 

 

 

Selections from Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov [Fyodorov] (1828-1902)

Fedorov, N. F. (1990). What was man created for? The philosophy of the common task. Selected works translated from the Russian and abdridged by Elisabeth Koutaissoff and Marilyn Minto. N.p.: Honeyglen Publishing/L'Age d'Homme.

(38) A truly moral being does not need compulsion and repeated orders to perceive what his duty is – he assigns to himself his task and prescribes what must be done for those from whom he has become separated, because separation (whether voluntary or not) cannot be irreversible. Indeed, it would be criminal to repudiate those from whom one descends and to forget about their welfare.

(39) So long as participation in knowledge does not embrace everyone, pure science will remain indifferent to struggle and depredation, while applied science will contribute to destruction either directly by the invention of weapons, or indirectly by endowing things like consumer goods with a seductive appearance, thus fostering friction among people.

(40) Only when all men come to participate in knowledge will pure science, which perceives nature as a whole in which the sentient is sacrificed to the insensate, cease to be indifferent to this distorted attitude of the conscious being to the unconscious force. Then applied science will be aimed at transforming instruments of destruction into means of regulating the blind death-bearing force.

E. Haeckel accepts 'scientific Materialism' and denies 'moral materialism'. He sees supreme bliss in the knowledge and discovery of the laws of nature. But even assuming that such knowledge were accessible to all, where would be the joy? In contemplating everywhere the ruthless struggle of all against all? Who could enjoy such hell?

(42) By unbrotherly relations we mean all juridical and economic relations, class distinctions and international strife. Among causes of unbrotherliness we include 'citizenship' and 'civilisation', which have displaced brotherhood, and also 'statehood', which has replaced loyalty to the land of the fathers. Loyalty to the land of the fathers is not 'patriotism', which replaces love for the fathers with pride in their achievement, thus substituting pride (a vice) for love (a virtue) and self-love and vanity for love of the fathers.

(43) There is only one doctrine which demands not separation but reunification, which sets no artificial aims but one common task for all – the doctrine of kinship... Only this doctrine can provide a solution to the problem of the individual and the masses.

Union does not absorb but exalts each individual, while the differences between individuals strengthen unity, which consists in (1) the realisation by every person that he is a son, grandson, great-grandson or descendant, that is, a son of all the deceased fathers and not a vagrant in the crowd, devoid of kith and kin ; and (2) the recognition by each and everyone, together and not in disunity as in a mob, of one's duty to the deceased fathers, a duty which is limited solely by sensuality, or rather by its misuse, for it breaks up rural communities and transforms them into amorphous mass.

(55) In the future, with the march of progress, contempt will decrease, but not even the withering away of contempt will engender love and support for one's predecessors, that is to say, the feelings which really ennoble the descendants. Therefore, can progress give any meaning to life, let alone any purpose? Only that which can express the loftiest forms of love and veneration gives meaning and purpose to life.

Resurrection is not progress, but it requires actual improvement, true perfection. A spontaneous happening like giving birth requires neither wisdom nor willpower unless the latter is confused with lust, whereas resuscitation is the replacement of the lust of birth by conscious recreation. The notion of progress in the sense of development, evolution, has been borrowed from blind nature and applied to human life. It recognizes an advance from the worse to the better and places articulate man above the dumb beast, but is it right that progress should follow nature's example, taking for its model an unconscious force and applying it to a conscious, sensate being?

Insofar as progress is regarded as a movement from worse to the better, it obviously requires that the shortcomings of blind nature be corrected by a nature which perceives these shortcomings - that is, by the combined power of the human race. It demands that improvement should arise not through struggle and mutual annihilation but by the return of the victims of this struggle. Then progress will mean the improvement of means as well as ends. Such an improvement would be more than correction; it would be the elimination of evil and the introduction of good.

(59) Failure to accept action as their duty confines the learned class to reflection, while the rest of the human race, uncommitted to any single task, continues to act instinctively and remains the tool of a blind force. Reflection can have only a destructive effect, since it does not restore what is being destroyed.

‘To be a conscious agent of the evolution of the universe' means to be the conscious tool of mutual constraint (struggle) and elimination (death). It means subjecting the moral to the physical, whereas even in the present state of disunity and inactive knowledge men still express, one way or another, moral aspirations, though they yield to necessity because of their physical weakness. Only when discord and inaction are recognised as temporary will we be able to imagine the magnitude and meaning of supreme bliss.

(61) Socialism is deception; it applies the words 'kinship' and 'brotherhood' to associations of people alien to each other and linked only by common interests, whereas real blood kinship unites through inner feeling.

The feeling of kinship cannot be limited to representatives; it demands real presence. Death transforms real presence into representation (memories). Therefore kinship demands the return of the deceased, each one being irreplaceable, whereas in an association death brings about an easily replaceable loss.

(63) In rejecting philanthropy and accepting Darwinism, the present century has accepted struggle as a legitimate occupation, thus endowing a blind tool of nature with a conscious purpose. The armaments of today are in complete harmony with its convictions, and only the backward – who wish to be regarded as progressives – reject war.

(72) The grief of a son mourning the death of his father is truly universal, because death as a law (or, rather, an inevitable hazard) of blind nature could not fail to arouse intense pain in a being who has attained consciousness, and who can and must achieve the transition from a world dominated by this blind force of nature to a world governed by consciousness, and where there is no place for death.

(75) . . . The state has arisen as an exceptional measure against the danger of mutual tribal extermination, or for the defence of group of tribes against another group that had formed an alliance to destroy or enslave the former. The state will be necessary until worldwide brotherhood is achieved. Unconsciously, universal kinship is beginning to come about but in a distorted way.

(76) Nature is regarded as a death-bearing, self-destructive force, but not because of its blindness. Yet where can a blind force lead except to death?

Humans admit nature to be a blind force even when they regard themselves as part of it and accept death as a kind of law and not as a mere accident which permeated nature and become its organic vice. Yet death is merely the result or manifestation of our infantilism, lack of independence and self-reliance, and of our incapacity for mutual support and the restoration of life.

People are still minors, half-beings, whereas the fullness of personal existence, personal perfection, is possible. However, it is possible only within general perfection. Coming of age will bring perfect health and immortality, but for the living immortality is impossible without the resurrection of the dead.

(79) The search for meaning is the search for a goal, a cause, a common task.

(82) History will become sacred only when remembrance – which is love – replaces the superfluous by the necessary, mass production by handicrafts, and death-bearing armaments by life-giving tools to unite all a single task.

To become sacred, . . . history must cease to be the saga of men's struggles against each other, of East against West . . . History must become the chronicle of the struggle for each other and against the blind force of nature acting both outside and within us; not a struggle to the finish against each other, but a struggle to the finish for union against death, for resuscitation and life.

(84) Even if, through the good economic organisation of society, the impossible were to be achieved and criminality were eliminated, the outcome would still not be brotherhood, because even when people are not battering each other they not necessarily love each other. Even to achieve that much is hardly possible, not because people are bad but because man cannot live without interacting with others in some great common task; he cannot be content with trifles...

...Equality itself cannot be regarded as Good, so long as people are insignificant – that is, mortal. For the sake of equality any superiority, any higher abilities, must be driven out, whereas among those united in brotherhood for the sake of a common cause, any talent arouses not envy but joy. The same applies to liberty. The freedom to live only for oneself is a great evil, even when it does not impinge on the rights of others and when justice would prevent conflict.

(84-85) A common cause enables all to take part in religion, science and art, the object of which is to achieve the rehabilitation and a secure existence for all. In such a society there can be no question of the right to work, because it is the duty of all, without exception, to participate in it; nor can there be any question of those incapable of working merely receiving the means of subsistence, because part of the Common Task is to rehabilitate them or endow them with the abilities of which they are deprived.

(85) Only love liberates, making duty towards others desirable and the implementation of that duty pleasant, something that is a burden but ardently longed for. Only love equalises, making those more richly endowed with abilities and strength sincerely anxious to serve the less fortunate. Therefore, love alone leads to brotherhood, whereas neither the liberty to satisfy one's own whims nor envious equality can lead to fraternity.

(87) If in any one of these stars consciousness emerged (which is very doubtful), it failed to become the governing, creative reason of that world undoubtedly because those conscious beings limited themselves to the procreation of similar ones, to laboratory experiments (experimental science), and wasted their time in internecine squabbles, in local government and constitutional intrigues (politics and social work) or in idle contemplation (philosophy). Meanwhile the energies of that world became diffused and spent themselves into extinction.

Our sun is dimming, however slowly, and we are right to say the hour will come when it will no longer give light, that ‘the time is at hand'. The extinction of stars (sudden or slow) is an instructive example, a terrifying warning. The growing exhaustion of the soil, the destruction of forests, distortions of the meteorological process manifested in floods and droughts – all this forebodes 'famines and plagues' and prompts us to heed the warning. Apart from a slowly advancing end, we cannot be certain whether a sudden catastrophe may not befall the Earth, this tiny grain of sand in the vastness of the Universe.

And yet, planet Earth is perhaps the only bearer of salvation, and the other millions of worlds merely nature's unsuccessful attempts.

(96) The spread of humanity over the planet was accompanied by the creation of new (artificial) organs and coverings. The purpose of humanity is to change all that is natural, a free gift nature, into what is created by work. Outer space, expansion beyond the limits of the planet, demands precisely such radical change. The great feat of courage now confronting humanity requires the highest martial virtues such as daring and self-sacrifice, while excluding that which is most horrible in war – taking the lives of people like oneself.

(98-99) Death can be called real only when all means of restoring life, at least all those that exist in nature and have been discovered by the human race, have been tried and have failed.

It should not be assumed that a special force will be discovered for this purpose. What we should assume is that the transformation of the blind nature into a conscious force will be that agent. Mortality is an inductive conclusion. We know that we are the offspring of a multitude of deceased ancestors. But however great the number of the deceased, this cannot be the basis for incontrovertible acceptance of death because it would entail an abdication of our filial duty. Death is a property, a state conditioned by causes; it is not a quality which determines what a human being is and must be.

(99) Decomposition is regarded [by the intellectual class] as a sign which admits of no further experimentation. However, one should remind them that decomposition is not a supernatural phenomenon and that the dispersed particles do not scatter beyond infinite space. The organism is a machine and consciousness relates to it like bile to the liver – so reassemble the machine and consciousness will return to it. . . . Thus posed, the problem of death obliges us to transform burial places and actual tombs into objects of active research.

(102) The immensity of the solar system is sufficient to inspire awe and, naturally, objectors will stress our smallness. When we turn our attention to small particles which consist of an enormous number of even smaller ones and which should also be brought within human economic management, then the objection will be our own size; indeed, for infusoria these tiny particles seem very great, and yet they are more accessible to them than to us.

The problem is obviously not one of size, and our relative smallness or bigness only indicates the difficulty – a severe difficulty, but not an impossibility. For a vast intellect able to encompass in one formula the motions both of the largest celestial bodies in the Universe and of the tiniest atoms, nothing would remain unknown; the future as well as the past would be accessible to him. The collective mind of all humans working for many generations together would of course be vast enough – all that is needed is concord, multi-unity.

(106) Supramoralism is the problem of the two unions and the two divisions, that is, the external division into rich and poor and the internal division into learned and unlearned (the two reasons). This is solved by replacing the problem of the universal striving for wealth by the striving for a universal return to life – that is to say, by replacing our artificial life, our artificial tasks, by a natural task achieved in us by nature itself which – through us – becomes rational.

Of course, owing to our urban way of life, which is extremely artificial and burdensome to all, the natural task of man, universal resurrection, must seem unnatural – one might even say very unnatural – but that does not mean that the task of universal resurrection is in fact unnatural, only that we have ourselves have become too unnatural; we have distorted ourselves, our very nature. For nature, transcending its state of unconsciousness to that of consciousness, resuscitation is as necessary and natural as birth and death are for blind nature.

(107) Only when the unification of the human race (namely, nature achieving consciousness, coming to an understanding of itself) is attained, will there be further progress both in this consciousness and in the control of nature itself by the human race – which is also part of nature, that part which has attained consciousness.

What will nature – which, in its present, unconscious state, is a force that procreates and kills – become when it achieves consciousness, if not a force restoring what it has destroyed in its blindness?

(109-110) The problem of wealth and poverty becomes identified with that of universal happiness, which is impossible in the face of death . . . Replacing the problem of poverty and wealth by that of death and life does not exclude the problem of adequate nutrition, that is, of the basic needs, because wealth as excess and poverty as malnutrition and deprivation conducive to death are part of the problem of death, while the problem of nourishment as a precondition for work and life falls within the problem of life, of sustaining life in the living and returning life to those who have lost it; it is the food and sanitary problem.

(113) The present exploitation, exhaustion and utilisation of nature oblige us to ask: what for? And it turns out to be for the production of toys and trifles, for entertainment and fun. This should not arouse our anger; we must remember that we deal with minors, even though they may be called professors, lawyers, and the like. Not 'with blind nature should our life be at one', but with our own kin, in order that rational beings may govern the irrational force.

Contrary to Schopenhauer's 'world as will and representation', it should be 'world as slavery and the project of liberation from enslavement', from dependence, from subordination to a blind force; for us the world has no will, and for beings endowed with feeling and capable of action and not mere contemplation, the world is not solely a representation but a project of liberation from bondage.

(114) Man as a rational being has but one enemy – the blind force of nature – and even that enemy will become an eternal friend when discord ceases among people, when they unite in order to understand and govern the blind force of nature, which punishes us for our ignorance as it punished Martinique this year (1902) for the scientists’ incorrect understanding of the volcanic processes.

For a rational being to obey nature means to govern it, because in the rational being nature has acquired a leader and a governor; whereas for submission, subservience, servility, and ignorance, nature, as already said, imposes the death penalty, and this year has sentenced to death over 40,000 people for poor progress in the study of volcanic forces.

For man as the consciousness of nature, the natural problem, the problem of nature as a force which procreates and kills, constitutes his natural task because it solves the problem of hunger, epidemics and sickness in general – that is, of old age and death.

(119) The attraction of external beauty for the sensuous force is a ploy to mislead individuals for the sake of preserving the species; attraction which neither sees nor wishes to see in the sensuous force also a lethal force fails to see the connection between birth and death, and leads to industrialism which serves to excite the sexual instinct. To protect itself industrialism creates militarism and exacerbates wealth and poverty, and the two latter engender socialism and the problems arising from the pursuit of wealth.

(120) The fact that the urban, industrial way of life gives pride of place to luxury industry, which is even termed scientific industry, shows that all industry and technology are doomed to serve the sexual instinct; this is deeply humiliating and shameful for the human intellect, and highlights the close affinity of humans to animals as well as the increasing moral degradation of the city.

(123) Has pure science, university science, the right to remain indifferent to human disasters? In other words, must it be knowledge just for the sake of knowledge, a knowledge of why the existing exists and not why the living suffers and dies?! And is not applied science criminal in creating objects of contention – industrial toys – and arming those contending for these toys with ever more destructive and pain-producing weapons, which powerfully contribute to making the Earth into a cemetery?

(125) Religion is the universal prayer of all the living in the face of suffering and death, a prayer for the return of life to all the deceased.

(127-128) The ability to live all over the Universe. enabling the human race to colonise all the worlds, will give us the power to unite all the worlds of the Universe into an artistic whole, a work of art . . . Then, unified, science and art will become ethics and aesthetics; they will become a natural universal technology of their work of art – the cosmos. United, science and art will become an ethico-aesthetic theurgy, no longer mystical but real.

(134) All the heavenly space and heavenly bodies will become accessible to man only when he is able to re-create himself from primordial substances, atoms and molecules, because only then will he be able to live in any environment, take on form and visit all generations in all the worlds, from the ancient to the most recent, the most remote as well as the nearest. Governed by all the resurrected generations, these worlds will be, in their wholeness, the creative work of all generations in their totality, as if of a single artist.

(139) When external regulation has been achieved, the inner psychophysiological force will tilt the balance away from sexual drive and lust towards love for the parents, and will even replace them, thus transforming the force of procreation into one of re-creation, the lethal into a vivifying force . . .

(146) . . . There can be nothing more unnatural for a rational being than to submit to a blind force.

(147) The responsibility rests on our entire culture and civilisation, where the aim of existence is for each individual to live for himself, where obligations and service to the community are accepted only as unavoidable evils, while the common cause of fathers and sons is entirely and deliberately overlooked, because people fear the loss of freedom and of seductive variety. Yet true freedom lies not in disunity (the right to ignore the existence of others); it lies in the true fullness of life attained through the common task of generations.

(156) Wishful thinking is of no avail, because far deeper and more powerful causes impel people to adopt hostile attitudes towards one another. So long as these causes that make people quarrel and fight are not eliminated, not even understood, war cannot be abolished. Even pacifists carry on such fierce debates with the advocates of war that their exchanges could become real warfare, had the contenders more power (duels have indeed occurred). So even the preaching of peace engenders militancy, and pacifists display aggressiveness and preach peace with hostility in their hearts. Such bitterness is quite comprehensible, when means as ineffective as words are used.

The blindness of both lovers of peace and defenders of war is astounding, for they do not see the enemy against which they should both unite and turn their arms. Possibly, they do notice this enemy, which is the blind force of nature, because it is present everywhere and always, within ourselves and without, and also because the defenders of both peace and war wish to have for their enemy not an unfeeling force but a being who can be made to feel their hate and anger, who can feel pain, and whose sufferings can be enjoyed by the lovers of peace.

(165) Yet even if man is recognised to be a creation of nature, one must admit that this creation has begun to understand its imperfection, which consists in the elimination, the absorption, of the old by the new, the latter to be eliminated and absorbed in its turn. This imperfection arises from the disunion of worlds owing to which life on Earth manifests itself only as a succession of generations; this imperfection is perceived as a law according to which nature destroys while creating, and war is regarded as subsumed under this law.

Yet man has always felt and recognised the imperfection of nature, and has never accepted it as law. He broke this law when he took his first step, because his vertical posture challenged gravity, the most universal law of nature. This upright position is not natural to man – it is supranatural – and he has achieved it artificially, through effort…

(192) . . . Light rays . . . will no longer be blind, like heat rays, nor coldly insensitive. Chemical rays will become capable of making a choice; that is, under their influence the related will be united, and the alien separated. This means that the rays will become an instrument of the common beneficent will of the sons of humanity.

(220) Although hell came to exist because we know not what we are doing, there is nothing astonishing in its depriving so many of hope, and in its seeming eternal.

‘They know not what they do’ can only become forgiveness and deliverance from hell when we learn what we need to do, what we must do. Our vices are perversions of virtues. So long as man has no outlet for his craving for action, he will waste it on exalting himself above others, on envy, hatred, anger and the accumulation and squandering of wealth. Even the tremendous power of the sexual urge will then find an adequate outlet in re-creation. Only the discovery of a field of activity directed towards saving life can free humanity of vice. This is a hypothesis. There is, however, no doubt that vice will dominate until scope for a lofty and life-saving activity is discovered.

(223) Scholars seek to discover law in history, which as fact is sheer lawlessness. They accept determinism, fatalism, the inevitable, and refuse to recognise history as a project for universal redemption which would imply the negation of determinism and fatalism.