The Philosophy of the Common Task

Last updated on: August 28, 2007 at 12:23 pm by Henry Karlson

The Philosophy of the Common Task 2007-08-28T12:23:00-05:00 Henry Karlson

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Recently, I created a poll asking the readers of Vox Nova to determine who they thought should be labeled the “most influential unknown.” One of the people I put on the list was Nikolai Fedorov (1828 – 1903). I was mildly surprised but also impressed with the fact that one person voted for him.

Very few have heard of him, clearly making him an unknown. Yet, the impact of his thought can be felt through the 20th century, not only in the development of social doctrine in the Orthodox Church, but also in the utopian vision of Soviet scientific experimentation, especially in the field of space exploration.

Who exactly is Fedorov? He was, ultimately, a humble man, who taught history and geography in Russian provincial schools before becoming a librarian in Moscow. Moreover, he was a creative thinker, in a way, a futurist, who tried to combine Russian Orthodox beliefs with science, and believed that the two were called to merge to bring about the kingdom of God, including, and especially, the resurrection of the dead. He believed, in an almost Anselmian sense, that it was the duty of humanity to help bring about the resurrection of the dead, because we owed everything we are, especially our lives, to them. He believed we could do this, and that the resurrection of Jesus was meant to encourage and influence us, making us imitate and follow his example. However, he also believed it was possible that this would not happen, and that we would not follow the mission given to humanity, the common task as he called it. In such a situation God could and would act. He believed that prophecies about the end of time, about the last judgment, were warnings of what could happen if we do not follow the will of God, similar to Jonah’s prophecies about Nineveh. His belief that Christianity should embrace a social doctrine and realize that dogmatic definitions had real-world implications helped develop an otherwise under-employed social doctrine for Orthodox thinkers to consider and purify; his scientism, which was far-reaching, helped shape the thought and goals of Soviet science.

As a way to introduce his thought, I would like to include four quotations from his posthumous work, The Philosophy of the Common Task, as published in What Was Man Created For: The Philosophy of the Common Task, ed. and trans. Elisabeth Koutaissoff and Marilyn Minto (Lausanne, Switzerland: Honeyglen Publishing, 1999). They provide key examples of his thought, including, however, issues which people could and should question.

The hateful division of the world and all calamities that result from this compel us, the unlearned – that is, those who place action (action in common, not in strife) above thought – to submit to the learned this memorandum concerned with lack of kinship feelings and the means of restoring them. In particular, we address theologians, those men of thought and ideology who rank thought above action. Of all divisions, the dissociation of thought and action (which has become the appurtenance of certain classes) constitutes a great calamity, incomparably greater than the division into rich and poor. Socialists and our contemporaries in general attribute the greatest importance to this division into rich and poor, assuming that with its elimination all of us would become educated. However, what we have in mind is not schooling which will become more evenly available with the elimination of poverty. What we have in mind is universal participation in knowledge and research. The elimination of poverty is not sufficient to ensure such a universal participation. Yet it alone can bridge the chasm between the learned and unlearned. (39)

The Divine Being, which is itself the perfect model for society, a unity of independent, immortal persons, in full possession of feeling and knowledge, whose unbreakable unity excludes death – such is the Christian idea of God. In other words, in the Divine Being is revealed what humanity needs to become immortal. The Trinity is the Church of the Immortals and its human image can only be a church of the resurrected. Within the Trinity there are no causes for death, and all the conditions for immortality. An understanding of the Divine Trinity can be attained only by achieving universal human multi-unity. So long as in actual life the independence of individuals is expressed in their disunity, and their unity in enslavement, universal human multi-unity modeled on the Trinity will only be a mental image, an ideal. If, however, we reject the separation of thought from action, then the Three-in-One will be not merely an ideal but a project, not merely a hope but a commandment. (71).

The possibility of a real transcendence from one world to another only seems fantastic. The necessity of such movement is self-evident to those who dare take a sober look at the difficulties of creating a truly moral society, in order to remedy all social ills and evils, because to forgo possession of celestial space is to forgo the solution of the economic problem posed by Malthus and, more generally, of a moral human existence. What is more of a fantasy – to think how to realise a moral ideal while closing one’s eyes to the tremendous obstacles in the way, or to boldly recognise these obstacles? Of course, one can give up morality, but that implies giving up being human. What is more fantastic – to create moral society by postulating the existence of other beings in other worlds and envisioning the immigration thither of souls, the existence of which cannot be proven, or to transform this transcendental migration into an immanent one – that is, to make such a migration the goal of human activity? (97-8).

All the heavenly space and heavenly bodies will become accessible to men only when he is able to re-create himself from primordial substances, atoms and molecules, because only then will he be able to live in any environment, take on any form, and visit all generations in all the worlds, from the most ancient to the most recent, the most remote as well as the most nearest. Governed by all the resurrected generations, these worlds will be, in their wholeness, the creative work of all generation in their totality, as if of a single artist. (134)

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