The Russian Cosmists by Giulio Prisco
Autor: José Galisi Filho | Publicado: 2015-03-12T13:28:00+01:00



Now a film, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” by George Carey, and a book, “The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers,” by George M. Young, make Russian Cosmism much more accessible to a Western audience.

The Russian Cosmist scientific, philosophical, and spiritual movement
 of the late 19th and early 20th century, was not well known in the West
 until recently. Most Cosmist writings are not available in other 
languages, and many aspects of Cosmist thinking were frowned upon in the
 Soviet era before 1991. Though Russian Cosmism is one of my main 
inspirations and one of the foundations of my own worldview, I am unable
 to read the original texts because I don’t speak Russian. Fortunately, 
there are more and more popular and scholarly works dedicated to Russian
 Cosmism. Now a film, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” [Carey 2011] by 
George Carey, and a book, “The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers,” [Young 2012] by George M. Young, make Cosmism much more accessible to a Western audience.




I recommend watching George Carey‘s film “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,”
 aired by the BBC on the 50th “Yuri’s Night,” 50 years after Yuri 
Gagarin’s pioneering flight to space, to all those who are interested in
 space, the history of the Russian space program, the amazing beautiful 
philosophy known as Russian Cosmism, our place and future in the 
universe, technological immortality, and resurrection.

The film captures the popular enthusiasm for space in the Soviet 
Union of the 60s. We had the same enthusiasm in the West at the time, 
and God knows we could use it now, all over the planet.
I think we can look, again, at the Cosmist philosophy to renew our 
enthusiasm and drive with beautiful and energizing cosmic visions, and 
to remember that wonderful adventures are waiting for us in outer space.
 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founding father of astronautics, was a 
brilliant scientist and engineer, but his motivation and drive came from
 his philosophical convictions, his belief in humanity’s destiny to 
leave the Earth and colonize the universe, and his vision of a deep 
unity between man and the cosmos.




Today, following the Cosmist tradition, Russia has a lively 
transhumanist community and Singularity scene, with the only operational
 cryonics facility not in the U.S., and the Global Futures 2045 
conferences dedicated to immortality and mind uploading.
Carey’s film features Gagarin, Russian scientists and space 
engineers, Tsiolkovsky and many other Cosmist thinkers, but the real 
protagonist is Tsiolkovsky’s mentor, the Cosmist mystic Nikolai Fedorov.
 He was one of the first modern thinkers who dared to suggest that, some
 day, science and technology may be able to resurrect the dead and bring
 back to life every person who ever lived.
Fedorov suggested that science was a tool given to us by God to 
enable us to resurrect the dead and, as promised, enjoy immortal life. 
He added that because the Earth could not sustain a population that 
never died, we must first learn to conquer space. His ideas about human 
evolution, and in particular the idea that humans should take control of
 the process and direct it towards their own goals, inspired generations
 of Russian scientists and led directly to contemporary transhumanism.




Fedorov thought that the physical resurrection is to be brought about
 by restoring the body to a condition that existed prior to death. A 
person is made up of atoms, and when a person dies these (finitely many)
 particles are scattered. Resurrection of the person occurs as a 
consequence of restoring the atoms to their previous arrangement. To 
carry out the resurrection it is necessary to determine what this 
arrangement was and then to reposition the particles. This is a problem 
to be solved by science rather than by appeals to an outside power.




His resurrection theory reflects 19th-century models of the universe 
and seems naive today. New technological resurrection theories based on 
contemporary science have been proposed, for example by R. Michael Perry
 [Perry 2000] and Frank Tipler [Tipler 1994]. But Perry’s and Tipler’s 
approaches, and mine, will probably seem equally naive to future 
scientists. Fedorov must be credited for the idea of technological 
resurrection, and we, his followers, are happy to see that many people 
are warming up to his vision. Following Fedorov, future scientists will 
scan the fabric of spacetime to find the dead, and bring them back to 
life.

Of course the super-science of technological resurrection, perhaps 
based on weird quantum physics (the term “Quantum Archeology” is often 
used), may not be developed until a very far future, perhaps thousands 
of years. But why hurry? To us, subjectively, no time will pass between 
death and resurrection. In the meantime, the Cosmist philosophy can give
 us the positive, solar optimism that we need.


Yuri Detail -by Tyler Jacobson
http://blog.directoryofillustration.com/author/tyler-jacobson/page/6/

Nikolay Fedorov was the illegitimate son of a Russian nobleman called
 Gagarin – Pavel Gagarin, Fedorov’s father, was not related to Yuri 
Gagarin the first cosmonaut, but this is an interesting coincidence to 
say the least. The film shows many aspects and protagonists of the the 
Russian space program and the young Soviet icon and folk hero Yuri 
Gagarin, but it’s centered on Fedorov’s ideas and legacy. In his “cosmic
 garden” Valery Borisov, a colorful Cosmist with a cowboy attire and an 
encyclopedic knowledge of Fedorov’s life and times, explains Fedorov’s 
ideas in a nutshell:

“Fedorov believed that science must help realize God’s 
plan for man’s salvation and for the resurrection of mankind. Christ 
said: what I have created, you must create too – and go further. What 
was it that Christ did? He rose from the dead. Literally, Christ was 
telling us to accomplish our own resurrection. Not to wait for some 
mystical event but to meet God halfway. Fedorov said if we resurrect 
everybody, they won’t all fit on Earth. And he said wisely: ‘In the 
Cosmos, abodes aplenty will appear.’ That’s why we need the Cosmos. The 
Cosmos offers empty planets where resurrected people will settle, and 
from there, direct the workings of the universe.”


The cover of the book "The Will of the Universe. Intellect Unknown. Mind and Passions" by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1928

We follow Carey to ISRICA, the Institute for Scientific Research in 
Cosmic Anthropoecology in Novosibirsk, and follow experimental sessions 
in a “Kozyrev Mirror” built to test the controversial theories of 
astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev – technology aided meditation may unlock 
the latent shaman in us, and let us communicate with the Cosmos. This 
part of the film shows the strong spiritual, New Age component of 
Cosmism, strongly emphasized by many Cosmist thinkers, but condemned by 
the Soviet regime. On the opposite side of the Cosmist galaxy, Danila 
Medvedev, the young transhumanist director of the cryonics provided 
Kriorus, proposes a hardline materialistic approach to immortality, 
based on advanced technologies and mind uploading, with no concessions 
to spirituality.

Young’s book, “The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers,”
 [Young 2012], is a very intense mini encyclopedia with a lot of short 
biographical, literary and philosophical entries about main and lesser 
known Cosmist thinkers, all influenced by Fedorov’s seminal work. 
Fedorov himself published almost nothing, but his most important works 
were collected by his followers and published after his death as “The Philosophy of the Common Task”
 [Fedorov 1990]. The author George M. Young, a professor of Russian 
language and literature, dedicated decades of research to this book, a 
complete and authoritative reference that, I hope, will make Cosmism 
much better known in the Western world.




Young emphasizes the Russianness of Cosmism, the vastness of Russian 
land and history as a unique stage for the emergence of a system of 
thought so vast and daring to encompass both science and religion in a 
synergistic whole. The Russian cultural identity is part of the common 
ground that holds Cosmism together.

Surprisingly, even Soviet bureaucrats were intrigued by Fedorov’s ideas on technological resurrection:

“Revolutionary immortality meant that individuals would 
die, but The People for whom the individual died would live on forever, 
and through inevitable progress in science and labor, The People of the 
future would eventually restore life to the sacrificed individuals… 
Lenin, waiting in his glass coffin, would be the first resurrected by 
science.”
Like Carey, Young shows the diversity of the Cosmist galaxy, and the 
many co-existing scientific, philosophical, religious, spiritual, as 
well as esoteric, shamanistic, gnostic approaches:

“Main themes in Cosmist thought include the active human 
role in human and cosmic evolution; the creation of new life forms, 
including a new level of humanity; the unlimited extension of human 
longevity to a state of practical immortality; the physical resurrection
 of the dead; serious scientific research into matters long considered 
subjects fit only for science fiction, occult, and esoteric literature; 
the exploration and colonization of the entire cosmos; the emergence on 
our biosphere of a new sphere of human thought called the ‘noosphere'; 
and other far reaching ‘projects:’ some of which may no longer seem as 
impossible or crazy as they did when first proposed in the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”


Anton Vidokle, film still from “This is Cosmos” (2014) (courtesy of the artist)

In her introduction to a valuable anthology of Cosmist thought 
published in I993, contemporary Cosmist Svetlana Semenova identifies the
 core Cosmist idea, active evolution:

“[The] idea of active evolution, i.e., the necessity for a
 new conscious stage of development of the world, when humanity directs 
it on a course which reason and moral feeling determine, when man takes,
 so to say, the wheel of evolution into his own hands …. Man, for 
actively evolutionary thinkers, is a being in transition, in the process
 of growing, far from complete, but also consciously creative, called 
upon to overcome not only the outer world but also his own inner 
nature.”





































Active evolution, taking the future of our species in our hands and 
steering it toward cosmic transcendence, is also the core idea of 
transhumanism, of which the Russian Cosmists must be considered as 
direct precursors. Critics say that active evolution is “against God’s 
will,” but the Cosmist insight is that, on the contrary, radical active 
evolution IS God’s will. One of Fedorov’s favorite Bible passages was: 
‘Truly, truly I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works
 that I do; and greater works than those will he do.’ (John 14:12, RSV).
 Young refers to “Fedorov’s active, forceful, masculine Christianity” – a
 Christianity of action, to become more like God.




References
Carey, George (2011). “Knocking on Heaven’s Door – Space Race.”&nbsp;Storyville. BBC. Web. &lt;http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0109ccb&gt;.
Fedorov, N. F., Elisabeth Koutaissoff, and Marilyn Minto (1990).&nbsp;What Was Man Created For?: The Philosophy of the Common Task : Selected Works. London: Honeyglen, 1990.
Young, George M. (2012).&nbsp;The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. New York: Oxford UP, 2012.
Perry, R. Michael (2000).&nbsp;Forever for All: Moral Philosophy, Cryonics, and the Scientific Prospects for Immortality. Universal Publishers, 2000.
Tipler, Frank J. (1994).&nbsp;The Physics of Immortality. New York: Random House, 1994.

Source:&nbsp; http://turingchurch.com/2014/01/01/the-russian-cosmists/

See also on Urania:&nbsp; http://urania-josegalisifilho.blogspot.de/2013/04/the-orbital-suprematist-machine-all.html

My interview with the Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev:&nbsp; http://urania-josegalisifilho.blogspot.de/2013/04/the-orbital-suprematist-machine-all.html

See also:
Russian Cosmism: Modern and Contemporary Art Exhibition and Auction at Erarta Galleries London
Interview with Maxim Boxer, curator of the exhibitionin London: 
&nbsp;http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/maxim-boxer-interview