Russian Cosmism

* Book: Russian Cosmism. Edited by Boris Groys. MIT Press, 2018

URL = https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/russian-cosmism

Contributors: Alexander Bogdanov, Alexander Chizhevsky, Nikolai Fedorov, Boris Groys, Valerian Muravyev, Alexander Svyatogor, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood

Description

Crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, written before and during the Bolshevik Revolution by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism.

Cosmism emerged in Russia before the October Revolution and developed through the 1920s and 1930s; like Marxism and the European avant-garde, two other movements that shared this intellectual moment, Russian Cosmism rejected the contemplative for the transformative, aiming to create not merely new art or philosophy but a new world. Cosmism went the furthest in its visions of transformation, calling for the end of death, the resuscitation of the dead, and free movement in cosmic space. This volume collects crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism.

Cosmism was developed by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov in the late nineteenth century; he believed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for the sick but to cure death using science and technology; outer space was the territory of both immortal life and infinite resources. After the revolution, a new generation pursued Fedorov's vision. Cosmist ideas inspired visual artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky read Fedorov's writings), architects, and composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology. In the 1930s, Stalin quashed Cosmism, jailing or executing many members of the movement. Today, when the philosophical imagination has again become entangled with scientific and technological imagination, the works of the Russian Cosmists seem newly relevant."

Discussion

Nicolas Berdyaev's role in the Cosmist movement

Alexei Anisin:

"The futuristic theme in the book under attention is where Berdyaev’s place in Russian Cosmism can be made intelligible. Cosmism was an intellectual movement that emerged in the late 19th century and was developed throughout the first third of the 20th century. Cosmists (the most prominent of which was Nikolai Fedorov) were in favor of technological development and viewed technology as a means to overcome death and achieve universal salvation. The progress of science was viewed to be indefinite, and with science, humans can become immortal and even reincarnate old historical persons. Eventually, scientific progress would enable human beings to be in control of the cosmos and to fulfil the biblical idea of resurrection. Today, Cosmism is gaining increasing ideological prevalence in technocratic circles in Russia (Faure 2021).

Young (2012) defines Russian Cosmism in the following way,

- “a highly controversial and oxymoronic blend of activist speculation, futuristic traditionalism, religious science, exoteric esotericism, utopian pragmatism, idealistic materialism – higher magic partnered to higher mathematics” (Young 2012, 3).

Russian Cosmism intersects between a heterogeneous collection of topics and in this “loose, diverse, and complex tendency,” (Young 2012, 11), Berdyaev’s work on the Russian soul (in his, the Russian Idea) is drawn upon by Young to describe Berdyaev’s eschatological ideas on the Russian soul and its position in achieving Russia’s eschatological destiny. Interestingly enough, Young’s (2012) analysis of Russian Cosmism features an autobiographical chapter of Berdyaev’s life, mentions his name 127 times throughout the book as a whole, but does not cite or engage with the Realm of Caesar and the Realm of Spirit and its five stages. This is significant because the historical time periods that are categorized in this work, especially the final (fifth) period, appear to share more similarity with Heidegger’s ideas on technology, rather than with the technological and scientific characteristics shared by Cosmists.

Young (2012) classifies Berdyaev into the “religious Cosmist” category. The religious type stands in contrast to the scientific type and figures as Tsiolkovsky or Chizhevsky, yet it would be farfetched to think that Berdyaev was in any way a proponent of technological advancement. Similarly, although Young acknowledges Berdyaev is somewhat different than other Cosmists, for example, in explaining the collectivist character of Russian Cosmists, Young notes that, if conflict should arise between the interests of the individual particle and the interests of the whole, the Cosmists would almost unanimously (Berdyaev being the possible dissident) prefer the interests of the whole. (Young 2012, 240). The issue in such a categorization is that there is too much evidence pointing to Berdyaev’s philosophy as being incompatible with the ultimate aims of Cosmism. In Truth and Revelation (1953), Berdyaev put forward a number of additional points about what spiritual transformation and an era that will be dominated by spirit. The entire basis of Berdyaev’s projection of a future spiritual transformation is that it will take place in the demarcated realm of spirit, away from the realm of Caesar (Berdyaev 1953, 142). Specifically, “the era of the spirit can be nothing but a revelation of sense of community which is not merely social but also cosmic, not only a brotherhood of man, but a brotherhood of men with all cosmic life, with the whole creation” (Berdyaev 1953,149). This emancipatory transformation will free human beings from social objectification and sociomorphisms that Berdyaev identified in the first four periods of his framework.

Berdyaev most likely would have viewed Cosmisist ideas of space colonization, scientifically prolonged life spans, immortality, and resurrecting figures of the past (beginning with Adam and Eve; Tucker 2017) to be a dangerous transgression of the Realm of Caesar because such attempts constitute human efforts of replacing God. Another example can be observed in Berdyaev’s assessment of the most notable of Cosmists (N. Fedorov) Berdyaev described Fedorov’s framework as one that was undesirably projective because it shifted the sphere of existing to the sphere of necessity, into projectivism. This shift from what exists to what should exist is projectivism and can also be considered as constituting a brash form of normativity (Medzibrodszky 2014). While I will not problematize Young’s (2012) inclusion of who can be considered to be a Russian Cosmist or not (Medzibrodszky 2014 identifies several inconsistencies about the typology as a whole), it is worth considering that Berdyaev believed the spiritual aspect of human nature would take precedence over the technical side, specifically that spirituality would rid society of technocratic elites. This runs counter to the Cosmisists’ ideas that the state could support some form of transformative and emancipative future in which science and technology could lead to universal salvation and immortality. Perhaps the most powerful statement that Berdyaev put forward against scientific practice is as follows, [S]cientific discoveries and technical inventions represent the terrible danger of more and more war. The chemists, perhaps quite unselfishly, discover at least partial truth, but the result has been the atomic bomb, which threatens our destruction. This goes on in the realm of Caesar. Salvation can come only by the light of integral Truth, which is revealed in the realm of Spirit. (Berdyaev 1952, 22)"

(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/916/1646)