Anti-Entropic Function of Life
Discussion
On the context of other Russian discussions leading to Ilyenkov's text.
Alexei Penzin:
"Regarding the immediate circumstances surrounding the writing of “Cosmology,” intellectual historians and biographers emphasize the influence of one of Ilyenkov’s most important friends in the 1950s, the scientist and self-taught speculative thinker Pobisk Kuznetsov (1924–2000). Everything about Kuznetsov was peculiar, starting with his first name: “Pobisk” is not a typical Russian name, but an acronym of the sentence “[P]okolenie [O]ktyabrskikh [B]ortsov [I] [S]troitelei [K]ommunizma,” i.e., “A Generation of the October Revolution Fighters and Builders of Communism.” Kuznetsov was an interdisciplinary scholar with a wide range of interests—from biology, chemistry, and physics to engineering, economics, and systems theory. He also spent time in a labor camp late in Stalin’s regime for organizing an unsanctioned discussion group where students addressed an ambitious question at the intersection of evolutionary biology and philosophy: What is the function or goal of life at the scale of the universe? In the course of his talks with Kuznetsov, Ilyenkov convinced him to write the entry on “Life” for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy that Ilyenkov coedited in the 1950s and ’60s.
Kuznetsov considered the function of life to be “anti-entropic.” Life brings higher forms of organization, creating an order from “chaos.” Entropy is a measure of the dispersal of energy; the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in closed systems, entropy can only increase, which eventually leads to a final dispersal of energy and ultimately the “death” of the system. Accordingly, “anti-entropic” refers to the capacity of some forms of matter (such as life) to counterbalance the increase of entropy. In the 1950s, Kuznetsov also wrote about the problem of the “thermal death of the universe”—its entropic collapse—with reference to Engels’s discussion of this question in his Dialectics of Nature. He also linked the “thermal death” problem to the anti-entropic function of life, hinting at a possible way out of this predicament.
Kuznetsov was not alone in generating ideas about the anti-entropic function of life. His work was part of a broader Soviet debate in the 1950s and ’60s about the meaning and final goal of both humanity and communism in the universe. Participants in this debate were aware that similar questions had been discussed in texts by earlier cosmists, albeit without much reference to the communist horizon. For example, another friend of Ilyenkov, the sci-fi writer and scientist Igor Zabelin, expressed similar views about the anti-entropic function of life in his book Chelovek i chelovechestvo: Etjudy Optimisma (The Human and humanity: Optimistic essays), published in 1970."