How Berdyaev Foresaw Our Reliance on Machines

* HUMANITY AND THE DISRUPTION OF THE COSMOS: HOW BERDYAEV FORESAW OUR RELIANCE ON MACHINES. By Alexei Anisin. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 3, 2021

URL = https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/916/1646

ABSTRACT

"In his final work, the Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar (1952), Nikolai Berdyaev categorized five historical periods on the relationship between humanity and nature. This meta-historical framework was articulated due to his concern about an obstructive imbalance between spirituality, materialism, and modern industrial technology. This essay overviews the framework and considers it with relation to eras subsequent his passing. It finds that Berdyaev’s projection was not only theoretically plausible, but turned out to be remarkably accurate in predicting the transition from a technical industrial society to one based around autonomous spheres of operation including the internet and artificial intelligence. The final stage of the fourth period, our current era, was predicted by Berdyaev to be marked by a new form of global subjugation – in the merging of technology with the state and our enslavement to our own discoveries. Attention is also given to a future, eschatological fifth period in which Berdyaev believed a spiritual revolution would accompany widespread dissolution of state power and the emancipation of labor."

Discussion

Nikolas Berdyaev on the Five Historical Periods of Humanity, as Related to Nature and Technology

By Alexei Anisin:

In the final years before his passing (the late 1940s), Berdyaev observed that humanity was set to experience a crisis of a new totality, a crisis that had hitherto never been seen. The crisis was believed to be based on the onset of a profound lack of balance between spirituality with relation to political organization and modern technology (Berdyaev 1952, 48). It would emerge in the latter half of the twentieth and in the specific fourth historical period as classified in his final book.

In this understudied work, Berdyaev put forward five historical periods that illustrate past and future relationships that human beings have to nature and the cosmos:

• Period one) our submersion to cosmic life in which human life depended on the natural world – a time when personality was not fully developed and humans did not fully conquer nature;

• Period two) humans became freed from cosmic forces, from spirits and demons attributed to nature – the emergence of elementary forms of economics and serfdom;

• Period three) humans carried out mechanization over nature through scientific and technical control – the development of industry, capitalism, a new necessity of selling one’s labor for wages;

• Period four) an era marked by the disruption of cosmic order, the dissolution of organic forms of human organization and the development of various autonomous spheres – where one of them claims totalitarian recognition. An era marked by a terribly augmented power that humans have over nature and their enslavement to their own discoveries;

• Period five) an eschatological revolution, the decline of the realm of Caesar, the dissolution of state power, labor emancipation, spiritual transmutation (Berdyaev 1952, 47).

The first three periods precede the twentieth century, whereas the fourth period begins with the era of WWII and spans into the twenty first century – a time which Berdyaev believed would feature the rise of an all-powerful state that would stake a total claim of objectivity over all of social and natural phenomena. This was not only the final stage of realm of Caesar, but also the last possible stage of this realm. Berdyaev describes this meta-historical trajectory succinctly: where once man feared the demons of nature and Christ freed him from demonolatry, now man is in terror before the world-wide mechanization of nature. The power of technics is the final metamorphosis of the realm of Caesar". (Berdyaev 1952, 48).

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