Cosmism

Discussion

Akop P. Nazaretyan:

" Eternity cannot have a history! ... Evolutionary processes on Earth were nothing but an ordinary local fluctuation, which was doomed to dissolve with time in the infinite universe, like an ocean wave. As to the universe as a whole ... it had always remained and would always remain exactly as we find it. Before Vernadsky, many outstanding thinkers (Francis Bacon, Nicolas de Condorcet, Charles Fourier, Friedrich Engels and others) had been racking their brains over the problem of concordance between a philosophy of progress and a naturalist vision of reality. All of them, more or less explicitly, came to the same discouraging conclusion: No infinite perspective for life and spirit is thinkable, if the destinies of the Earth and Sun are limited. At best, it was assumed that eternal matter was regularly producing splashes, like evolution on Earth, in various points of cosmic space; any continuation or progression between those local stories were external to the discussion. Only the most reckless of the German and Russian ‘Cosmists’ dared to argue that human intelligence would lead its bearers from their cradle planet far into cosmic space, guaranteeing infinite progress to Earth's civilizations. The first proponents of these Cosmist views were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Nikolay Fedorov and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. These visionaries were considered a laughingstock by many of their contemporaries. Yet, even the Cosmists had a limited vision – they extended their evolutionary outlook into the future but not backwards on the past: The pre-human Cosmos remained outside their view of history."

(http://www.socionauki.ru/almanac/issues/evolution_2_en/full_text_nazaretyan.pdf)

Source

* Article: Mega-Evolution and Big HistorY. By Akop P. Nazaretyan. In the book: Evolution: A Big History Perspective 2011 82–100

URL = http://www.socionauki.ru/almanac/issues/evolution_2_en/full_text_nazaretyan.pdf