Vladimir Vernadsky
Discussion
Vernadsky's Vision of the Noosphere
1. Irina Trubetskova:
"Vernadsky defined the future evolutionary state of the biosphere as the Noosphere, the sphere of reason. The term "Noosphere" was first coined by the French mathematician and philosopher, Edouard Le Roy (1927). "Le Roy, building on Vernadsky's ideas and on discussions with Teilhard de Chardin [they both attended Vernadsky's lectures on biogeochemistry at the Sorbonne in 1922-1923], came up with the term "noosphere", which he introduced in his lectures at the College de France in 1927 (Le Roy, 1927)... Vernadsky saw the concept as a natural extension of his own ideas predating Le Roy's choice of the term" (Smil, 2002, p. 13). Le Roy understood the noosphere as a shell of the Earth or a "thinking stratum", including various components, such as industry, language, and other forms of rational human activity (Arbatov and Bolshakov, 1987). Le Roy's concept was developed by De Chardin, who considered the noosphere as something external to the biosphere - a progression from biological to psychological and spiritual evolution. Teilhard based his conception based on philosophical writings, and was completely ignorant of Vernadsky's biogeochemical approach. Vernadsky developed his concept of the noosphere out of his theory of the biosphere, combining his biogeochemical works with his own work in philosophy of science (Grinevald, 1998, p. 24-25):
Both Vernadsky and Teilhard were cosmic prophets of globalization. If Teilhard was a "cosmic mystic", Vernadsky defined himself as a "cosmic realist"... They shared a belief in science and technology as a universal, peaceful and civilizing force... But in The Biosphere and in all his work, Vernadsky's scientific perspective is radically different from that of Teilhard. The divergence is perhaps best expressed as an opposition between the anthropocentric view of life (Teilhardian biosphere) and the biocentric view of the nature's economy (Vernadskian Biosphere)...
According to Vernadsky, the biosphere became a real geological force that is changing the face of the earth, and the biosphere is changing into the noosphere. In Vernadsky's interpretation (1945), the noosphere, is a new evolutionary stage of the biosphere, when human reason will provide further sustainable development both of humanity and the global environment:
- In our century the biosphere has acquired an entirely new meaning; it is being revealed as a planetary phenomenon of cosmic character... In the twentieth century, man, for the first time in the history of earth, knew and embraced the whole biosphere, completed the geographic map of the planet earth, and colonized its whole surface. Mankind became a single totality in the life on earth... The noosphere is the last of many stages in the evolution of the biosphere in geological history.
Vernadsky made an important contribution to science in general, and in ecology in particular. It is essentially Vernadsky's theory of the biosphere, expounded in his work "Biosfera" (1926) that is embodied in the global approach to ecological problems today. To solve global ecological problems that may endanger even the very existence of humanity in t5he future, a cultivation of a new worldview among people, and especially young generations, is absolutely needed. I.P.Volkov (1997) puts it this way:
- The methodological rule of the global approach is to rise above the everyday occurrence, run up above the Earth, to become that astronaut who's observed the Earth from the Moon, for example, as the American astronauts have done it seven times, or to become a spaceman watching (and studying) the planet phenomena from the orbit near our Earth.
Though none of the globalists has visited outer space yet, nevertheless, each of them is able to do it with the help of psyche in his imagination, in his thoughts, in his imaginary view of the planet from space. That is the noospheric outlook on the phenomena of the Earth.
The best way to be acquainted with Vernadky's doctrine of the Biosphere and Noosphere is to read his original writings as some of them are fortunately available in English now."
2. David Ronfeldt:
Vernadsky’s thinking about the noosphere: Vernadsky’s views parallel but also differ from Teilhard’s — Vernadsky’s are much more materialist, in spots more mystical, and always less spiritual (Vernadsky was an atheist). Like Teilhard, he too held that Earth first evolved a geosphere, then a biosphere — and a noosphere is next. Indeed, he wrote the first book on The Biosphere (1926), in which he treated the spread of life as an essentially geological force.
In his landmark paper, “New Scientific Knowledge and the Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere” (1938), Vernadky argues that increases and changes in the nature of “biogeophysical energy” — owing to a progression of inventions from fire-making, to agriculture, to modern communications technologies, etc. — explain the planetary spread of the biosphere and the coming emergence of a noosphere. In his words, “This new form of biogeochemical energy, which might be called the energy of human culture or cultural biogeochemical energy, is that form of biogeochemical energy, which creates at the present time the noösphere.” (p. 16) This kind of energy, he wrote, lay behind the development of the human mind and reason itself; and it will lead “ultimately to the transformation of the biosphere into the noösphere, first and foremost, through the creation and growth of the scientific understanding of our surroundings.” (p. 20)
see: http://21sci-tech.com/Articles_2012/Spring-Summer_2012/04_Biospere_Noosphere.pdf
Vernadsky goes on to say that the creation of the noosphere has “proceeded apace, ever increasing in tempo” during the “last five to seven thousand years” despite “interruptions continually diminishing in duration” (p. 29). He evidently expects “the unity of the noosphere” to bring “a planned unified activity for the mastery of nature and a just distribution of wealth associated with a consciousness of the unity and equality of all peoples”. But while it is “not possible to reverse this process”, he expects “the transitional stage” to be accompanied by “ruthless struggle” and “intense struggles” that may span several generations. Nonetheless, he doubts “there will be any protracted interruptions in the ongoing process of the transition from the biosphere to the noösphere.” (p. 30) Finally, as he conveys all this with confidence, he nonetheless seems to wonder whether it all “transcends the bounds of logic” and whether “we are entering into a realm still not fully grasped by science.” He even makes positive closing references to Hindu philosophy and to the role of art in man’s thinking (p. 31).
Later, despite his dismay about the destructiveness of WWII, Vernadsky clarified optimistically in an article based on translations of earlier writings, in “The Biosphere and the Noösphere” in the journal American Scientist in 1945 that:
“The historical process is being radically changed under our very eyes. For the first time in the history of mankind the interests of the masses on the one hand, and the free thought of individuals on the other, determine the course of life of mankind and provide standards for men’s ideas of justice. Mankind taken as a whole is becoming a mighty geological force. There arises the problem of the reconstruction of the biosphere in the interests of freely thinking humanity as a single totality. This new state of the biosphere, which we approach without our noticing it, is the noösphere. … “Now we live in the period of a new geological evolutionary change in the biosphere. We are entering the noösphere. This new elemental geological process is taking place at a stormy time, in the epoch of a destructive world war. But the important fact is that our democratic ideals are in tune with the elemental geological processes, with the laws of nature, and with the noösphere. Therefore we may face the future with confidence. It is in our hands. We will not let it go.” (in BNR, p. 99)
Note that despite despair about WWII, he still identified the nascence of the noosphere with such values as freedom, justice, and democracy.
Throughout his varied writings about “the evolution of the biosphere into the noosphere,” Vernadsky extolled the emergence of reason as a powerful, even geological force tied to the development of science and scientific thinking. He thus mostly regarded the noosphere as the “sphere of reason”, the “realm of reason,” the “reign of reason,” and as “the way through which the noosphere manifests itself in the thinking process” — even as “life's domain ruled by reason.” http://vernadsky.name/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Scientific-thought-as-a-planetary-phenomenon-V.I2.pdf
Vernadsky’s audience was mostly fellow scientists in Russia, not policy-makers. But he did occasionally argue that government administrators should attend to his findings, and that “Statesmen should be aware of the present elemental process of transition of the biosphere into the noosphere.” (in BNR, p. 38)
3. Via Peter Critchley:
"Vernadsky wrote that he was introduced to the concept by Édouard Le Roy’s 1927 lectures at the College of France. (Vernadsky, Vladimir: Some Words on the Noosphere) Aphorism 11. (Original Published 1944). The first use of the term was by Teilhard de Chardin in 1922 (in his Cosmogenesis). Some claim that the term originated with Édouard Le Roy rather than Teilhard de Chardin. They knew each other, in any case. (Fuchs-Kittowski, K.; Krüger, P.: The Noosphere Vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir I. Vernadsky in the Perspective of Information and of World Wide Communication; in World Futures: Vol. 50, No. 1-4, 1997. p. 768).
Stated in a couple of lines, Vernadsky’s understanding of the noosphere seems similar to Teilhard’s, described as the planetary “sphere of reason,” the new state of the biosphere. (Moiseyev, Nikita Nikolaievich: Man and the Noosphere; The noosphere represents the highest stage of biospheric development, its defining factor being the development of humankind's rational activities. (Translation of Russian Title: Petrashov, V.V.: The Beginning of Noocenology: Science of Ecosystem Restoration and the Creation of Nocenoses; Pitt, David; Samson, Paul R. (2012). The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader: Global Environment, Society and Change. Oxon: Routledge. pp. 6; Yanshin, A. L.; Yanshina, F.T.: Preface; in Vernadsky, Vladimir Ivanovich: Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon, Moscow, Nongovernmental Ecological V.I.Vernadsky Foundation, 1997, (Original translated by B.A.Starostin) p. 6.) Vernadsky But whereas Teilhard develops the theological/humanist dimensions, Vernadsky’s concept is grounded in the geological sciences. It’s interesting to pt both concepts together (which for me is the view consistent with the two concepts of God in the Hebrew Bible, Elohim and Hashem, the God of the Creation as physical universe and the God of love and personal relations). The view common to both is that human reason is active in creating the next evolutionary geological layer as part of the evolutionary chain, joining culture and nature. Some claim it was Vernadsky who introduced the concept of the biosphere into the notion of noosphere, which fits the idea of him as a pioneer in this area, grounding the idea in the natural sciences – his own field of biogeochemistry - away from theology, but it seems that Teilhard was well aware of the concept of the biosphere, developed by Edward Suess in 1875. (Levit, Georgy S.: The Biosphere and the Noosphere Theories of V.I. Vernadsky and P. Teilhard de Chardin: A Methodological Essay, International Archives on the History of Science/Archives Internationales D'Histoire des Sciences", 2000. p. 161).
There are fundamental differences between Teilhard and Vernadsky, mind – but the view of human activity becoming conscious as a geological power, capable of influencing the environment consciously from within, is similar.
Vernadsky is worth exploring on this. (As is Teilhard, whose work seems much more well-known). Vernadsky made the noosphere the third phase of the Earth’s development after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). In contrast to purely naturalist conceptions (Gaia for instance), Vernadsky underscores the way that human cognition transforms the biosphere in fundamental ways. The noosphere thus emerges as humankind comes to consciousness through the increasing mastery of physical processes.
The interesting thing for me is that both thinkers were prepared to go beyond the boundaries of natural science – and hence their views risk being dismissed as ‘not scientific’ - to create overarching theoretical constructions – dare I say metaphysics – comprising philosophy, social sciences and ethics as well as evolutionary theory. (Levit, Georgy S.: The Biosphere and the Noosphere Theories of V.I. Vernadsky and P. Teilhard de Chardin: A Methodological Essay, International Archives on the History of Science/Archives Internationales D'Histoire des Sciences", 2000). I’m also interested in the factb that Vernadsky’s view, grounded in the natural sciences, converged with Teilhard’s in possessing a teleological character. Both argued for the teleological character of evolution. (Many don’t want to go there, but I read people like theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, or Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, and many more, and I don’t see how they avoid teleology even if they refuse to recognise it or overtly deny it). It’s no wonder that the scientific status of the concept is questioned, given the extent to which it drew, in aspects, from Henri Bergson and his ‘Lévolution créatrice (1907), the idea that evolution is "creative" and cannot necessarily be explained solely by Darwinian natural selection. According to Bergson, this creativity is sustained by a constant vital force, animating life and connecting mind and body in a way that contradicts Cartesian dualism of One hundred years later, Stuart Kauffman proposes much the same thing in ‘Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion.’ Kauffman writes of will, consciousness, and agency as emergent within an endlessly creative universe. He claims that to be ‘God enough.’ (I’m not sure about that, since it loses transcendendence, but you can see it as an immanent view that has a lot in common with Teilhard and Vernadsky). Basically, it’s the idea that human beings are co-creators in a ceaselessly creative universe. Co-evolution. Sounds new. I would argue that Marx’s metabolic thinking is well worth exploring, not least because it brings us to mediation and the human role in evolution via specific social relations and forms in time and place. The end is the harmonization of cultural and biological evolution. I know Vernadsky most as one of the few who developed Marx’s pioneering metabolic understanding, emphasising the mediation and relation between the social metabolic order and what Marx called “the universal metabolism of nature.” I think it’s here – encompassing all the critique of political economy, praxis, agency that Marx emphasised – and the relation of ‘Nature’ where the focus should be when it comes to addressing environmental crisis. The environment is social and cultural (and moral) as well as natural, it’s the mediation that matters."
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Vernadsky's Unique Holistic Approach
NOOSPHERE AS A BIO-TECHNO-SPHERE:
Giulia Rispoli and Jacques Grinevald:
"The biosphere and the noosphere have to be considered as inseparable, interconnected systems that are crossed by a continuous exchange of biogeochemical and cultural processes. Human activity is indeed associated with the rise of a new form of energy that is not only biogeochemical but also, and at the same time, cultural. The exchange between the two spheres, however, does not compromise the specific autonomy of each one. Boundaries between them play an important role: Rather than obstructions or barriers, they act to increase the differentiation of sub-systems within a whole substantial unity.
Vernadsky was not the only one to introduce the notion of the noosphere. Edouard Le Roy developed this idea in complicity with his younger friend Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. They proposed to look at this stage as the last and ultimate one in the biosphere’s evolution. The noosphere is a culmination of a collective spiritual agent, a super-mind, which drives the Earth towards the Omega-Point.Georgy Levit, Biogeochemistry-Biosphere-Noosphere. The Growth of the Theoretical System of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky. Berlin: VWB Verlag Für Wissenschaft Und Bildung, 2001.
Vernadsky’s conceptualization of the noosphere differed significantly from those advanced by the French Catholic thinkers. According to Vernadsky the problem of the origin of life was the problem of the formation of the Earth’s biosphere, therefore the impact of human consciousness on Earth was a question entirely rooted in the biosphere and its biogeochemistry. In contrast to a spiritual stage qualitatively separated from the biosphere, the noosphere, according to Vernadsky, marks the emergence of human technological and scientific activity as a geological phenomenon that is functionally and physiologically dependent on Earth’s mechanisms. Thus, the noosphere is a concrete material system that connects humankind and the planetary environment through science and technics, and whose processes can be traced back in the Earth’s geochemistry. The noosphere discloses a complex system in which all life, including man and its exosomatic instruments, the earthly environment, and all technologies became inseparable. In this respect the word bio-techno-sphere would be even more suited then technosphere to untwist the bundle underlying the Vernadskian notion of the noosphere.
As Vernadsky pointed out in his Problems of Biogeochemistry, in the course of the last half-millennium the development of civilized humankind’s strong influence over its surrounding nature, and its comprehension of it, continued growing ever more powerful and with an accelerating tempo.
“During that time the unified culture embraced all the surface of the planet (see § 64), the book printing became discovered, all earlier inaccessible areas of the Earth were recognized, new forms of energy (steam, electricity, radioactivity) were mastered, all chemical elements became coped with and used for human demands, telegraph and radio were invented, the drilling penetrated into the Earth’s crust for kilometers, and man rose with his aeroplanes to a height of over 20 kilometers from the surface of the geoid. [...] The question of the planned, unified activity for mastering nature and for the right distribution of the wealth is now on the agenda. This question is tied up with the consciousness of the unity and equality of all people, with the consciousness of the unity of the noosphere.
Was Vernadsky a precursor to the post-Second World War Holocene-Anthropocene transition? Probably not. It is true that he had already prefigured ethical issues deriving from the ecological imbalances of man’s engagement with nature in a time when ecological concerns were banished under the Stalinist regime; but Vernadsky was thus censored, deformed, or ignored until very recently. However, if on the one hand he believed that changes and accelerations in the human technical system of labor and production can cause geological phenomena of huge significance, on the other his noosphere notion seems to coincide with the fulfillment of a new morality, a new rationality, and eventually the emergence of a new humanism. This does not resemble the catastrophic tone of Crutzen’s Geology of Mankind or, more in general, the idea of the Anthropocene that constantly reminds us about the damaging effects that humankind has had on the environment since at least the thermo-industrial revolution of the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, Vernadsky’s latest writings on the noosphere seem instead more optimistic with regard to humanity’s future use of scientific and technological knowledge.
By highlighting the importance of the study of coevolution between humanity and the biosphere from a long-term perspective, the noosphere unveils a more complex concept, in philosophical terms, and with a historical depth that precedes humankind’s most recent endeavors.Oldfield and Shaw, “V.I. Vernadsky and the noosphere concept,” 2006. We must remember also that Vernadsky’s geological thought was mainly Huttonian, and very different from the “Wegenerian revolution” (J. Tuzo Wilson) of the 1960s or the more recent neocatastrophism of mass extinctions and biodiversity crisis thinking. Understanding the noosphere calls then for a more comprehensive historical analysis, going beyond an explanation of the human degradation of terrestrial ecosystems, the so-called global environment, or sustainability.
Vernadsky’s holistic approach problematizing the relations between humankind, scientific and technological progress, and the Earth was overlooked by his contemporaries. This lack of intellectual and institutional support in the West (France, England, and the United States) was one of several reasons why Vernadsky decided to return to the Soviet Union, where he developed his biogeochemical studies within the Academy of Sciences. In the Stalinist State Vernadsky was respected as an international-class geoscientist and even honored, but not really understood; his social and philosophical ideas were repressed by communist ideologists. After his death, and at the beginning of the Cold War, Vernadsky’s ideas were banned and rehabilitated only during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika.
Vernadsky’s renaissance started in the 1960s, and the rediscovery of his biosphere–noosphere theory, the originality of his approach, and the charisma of his persona emerge vividly today, driving us through the intricate threads connecting the Anthropocene debate and the rebirth of the technosphere notion, but still able to fuel and enrich current controversies and narratives."
More information
Vernadsky V.I., 1926. Biosphera (The Biosphere), Nauchnoe khimiko-technicheskoye izdatel'stvo (Scientific Chemico-Technical Publishing): Leningrad, 200p.
Vernadsky V.I., 1944. Problems of Biochemistry II, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 35: pp. 488-489.
Vernadsky V.I., 1945. The Biosphere and the Noosphere, Scientific American 33 (1): pp. 1-12.
Vernadsky V.I., 1998. The Biosphere, A Peter A.Nevraumont Book, N.Y.: pp. 41-150.