Nikolai Fyodorov Quotes on Knowledge
Nikolai Fyodorov (1829–1903), the eccentric Moscow librarian whose posthumously assembled Philosophy of the Common Task (1906–13) gave Russian philosophy its founding statement of cosmism, defended the proposal that the proper task of human knowledge is the technological resurrection of all the dead and the expansion of the human community to fill the cosmos. The framework treats death as the central cognitive and moral problem — the disintegration of the kin group through the passage of generations is the underlying disorder of the historical world — and the scientific enterprise as the philosophical instrument through which the brotherhood of the living and the dead is to be incrementally restored.
Quotes
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Attributed to Nikolai Fyodorov:
“Science must serve the resurrection of the dead, not the destruction of the living.”
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Attributed to Nikolai Fyodorov:
“Knowledge that does not save is mere ornament.”
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“Part I, § 2, pp. 36–37”
The learned, who have fragmented science into a multiplicity of branches, imagine that the calamities that strike and oppress us are within the competence of specialised disciplines to control, whereas in fact they constitute a single problem common to all of us, namely the lack of kinship relations between a blind force and rational beings. This blind force makes no demand on us other than to end -
“Part I, § 4, pp. 38–39”
A truly moral being does not need compulsion and repeated orders to perceive what his duty is – he assigns to himself his task and prescribes what must be done for those from whom he has become separated, because separation (whether voluntary or not) cannot be irreversible. Indeed, it would be criminal to repudiate those from whom one descends and to forget about their welfare. For the learned to -
“[T]he rural problem is (1) loss of kinship between men who, through ignorance, forget their relatedness, and (2) the hostility of nature to humans, which is felt most acutely if not exclusively in villages, where people confront the blind force directly; whereas townsfolk, being remote from nature, may think that man lives at one with nature.”
Part I, § 4, p. 39 -
“Only when all men come to participate in knowledge will pure science, which perceives nature as a whole in which the sentient is sacrificed to the insensate, cease to be indifferent to this distorted attitude of the conscious being to the unconscious force.”
Part I, § 5, p. 40