Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov Quotes

[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.

Before talking about resurrection one must state firmly that, just as death is impossible where there exist sinlessness and knowledge that can control the forces of nature, so resurrection is impossible where there exist sin, ignorance and other misfortunes resulting from man's dependence on the blind forces of nature.

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 behave thus would be to reject their own welfare, to remain prodigal sons for ever and be permanent hirelings and servants of urban caprice. This would lead them to disregard completely the needs of rural communities, that is, real needs, because the needs of such communities, unspoilt by city influences, are limited to those essentials that ensure survival in the face of hunger and illness, which not only destroy life but also displace kinship relations and replace love by enmity and hostility.

Negative virginity is not yet a celestial virtue; chastity is not yet active wisdom; not to beget is not yet liberation from death — resurrection. It is essential that unconscious procreation be replaced by the task of resuscitation.

If, however, progress is the transformation of the spontaneous (procreation) into conscious work, we must regard parasites as an inherent evil. The control method used is undoubtedly immoral, since it takes advantage of the natural evil of an epidemic. Nor can the annihilation of any insect be considered moral. Only the complete transfiguration of a blind force (procreation) into a conscious act can be called moral.

What will nature — which, in its present, unconscious state, is a force that procreates and kills - become when it achieves consciousness, if not a force restoring what it has destroyed in its blindness ? How senseless are statements about the incommensurability of the forces of man, that is, of nature striving towards consciousness and control, and the forces of the same blind nature. And should one term 'human force' merely that of man's own hand, or include what he can achieve through nature ? And are human force and human activity to be limited to what man achieves now by using the forces of nature ? Why, the true, the natural task has not even begun...

Our task is to make nature, the forces of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings. The problem of God's transcendence or immanence will only be solved when humans in their togetherness become an instrument of universal resuscitation, when the divine word becomes our divine action.

The principle of disunion and inactivity informs all three Critiques. The philosophy of art which he embodies in his Critique of Judgement does not teach how to create, but only how to judge the aesthetic aspects of works of art and of nature. It is a philosophy for art critics, not for artists and poets. In the Critique of Judgement, nature is regarded not as an object to be acted upon and transformed from a blind force into one governed by reason, but merely as an object of contemplation to be judged on its aesthetic merits; not from the point of view of morality, which would recognise it as destructive and death-bearing...

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 endow it with what it lacks: rational direction, or regulation. Yet no regulation is possible owing to our disunity, and our disunity persists because there is no common task to unite men. Regulation, the control of the blind force of nature, can and must become the great task common to us all.

Till now consciousness, reason and morality were localised on planet Earth; by resurrecting all the generations who have lived on this Earth, consciousness will be disseminated to all the worlds of the Universe. Resurrection is the transformation of the Universe from that chaos towards which it is moving into cosmos — into the greatness of incorruptibility and indestructibility.

The problem of the force which brings the two sexes to unite and give birth to a third being is also a problem of death.

How unnatural it is to ask, ‘Why does that which exist, exist?' and yet how completely natural it is to ask, ‘Why do the living die?

Nature is regarded as a death-bearing, self-destructive force, but not because of its blindness. Yet where can a blind force lead except to death? Humans admit nature to be a blind force even when they regard themselves as part of it and accept death as a kind of law and not as a mere accident which has permeated nature and become its organic vice. Yet death is merely the result or manifestation of our infantilism, lack of independence and self-reliance, and of our incapacity for mutual support and the restoration of life. People are still minors, half-beings, whereas the fulness of personal existence, personal perfection, is possible. However, it is possible only within general perfection. Coming of age will bring perfect health and immortality, but for the living immortality is impossible without the resurrection of the dead.

Man placed himself at the mercy of fate (that is to say, the annual rotation of the Earth), he submitted to the Earth; childbirth replaced the artistry of reproducing oneself in other beings, a process comparable to the birth of the Son from the Father, or the procession of the Holy Ghost. Later, proliferation increased the struggle, which was fostered by an unbridled surge of procreation; and with the increase in birth, mortality increased too. The conditions which could have regulated this concatenation of phenomena disappeared, and gradually there came revolutions, storms, drought and earthquakes; the solar system became an uncontrolled world, a star with an eleven-year cycle or some other periodicity of various catastrophes. Such is the system we know. One way or another, to confirm us in our knowledge, the solar system must be transformed into a controlled economic entity.

Apart from a slowly advancing end, we cannot be certain whether a sudden catastrophe may not befall the Earth, this tiny grain of sand in the vastness of the Universe.