by Jeff Love
Lest one think Fedorov simply mad, it may be well to note that he attracted the most serious interest from many of the best minds in nineteenth-century Russia, among whom one can count Dostoevsky, Soloviev, Leo Tolstoy, and an illustrious cohort of scientists and adventurers, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of spaceflight.36
Fedorov was born on June 9, 1829, in Kliuchi in the Tambov province. He was the illegitimate son of Pavel Gagarin, an aristocrat. Fedorov was allowed a decent education, though he left the equivalent of high school for reasons that are not entirely clear and did not attend university. He became a schoolteacher in southern Russia for about twenty years, moving from town to town until he ended up as the main librarian at the Rumiantsev Library in Moscow, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Fedorov attracted attention immediately. His knowledge of the library’s holdings and their contents was legendary, as was his frugal lifestyle and his one obsessive thought, the “common task” (общее дело): universal resurrection. His early admirer N. P. Peterson brought his thought to the attention of Dostoevsky and Soloviev, who grew fascinated with Fedorov’s idea. Tolstoy took notice too, and Fedorov and Tolstoy engaged in many conversations during the 1870s and 1880s. While Tolstoy admired Fedorov’s simplicity, he disagreed with Fedorov’s project of universal resurrection (considering it a rejection of our humanity rather than as the highest expression of it).
Fedorov also acquired a series of other admirers, such as Tsiolkovsky. His major work, The Philosophy of the Common Task (Философия общего дела), was published in two parts, in 1906 and 1913. It consists largely of comments recorded by Peterson or another disciple, the remarkable polymath Vladimir V. Kozhevnikov.
After the revolution, Fedorovian communities emerged in various places (such as Harbin, China), and his influence can be felt in the communist insistence on the new man and the sometimes very radical hope of abolishing death; the Immortality Commission and the embalmment of Vladimir Lenin is one product of this hope. The great twentieth-century writer Andrei Platonov was an enthusiastic Fedorovian, and the thought of that important rival to Lenin, Alexander Bogdanov, reflects Fedorov’s influence as well.
With this in mind, I want to explore Fedorov’s “idea” within the confines of several important texts contained in the compendious miscellany that is Philosophy of the Common Task. The two primary texts I examine have extraordinary titles: “On the Problem of Brotherhood or Kinship, on the Causes of the Non-brotherly, Non-Kindred, that is, the Non-peaceful State of the World, and of the means for the Restoration of Kinship: A Memorandum from the ‘Unlearned’ to the ‘Learned,’ Clergy and Laity, Believers and Non-believers” and “Supramoralism or Universal Synthesis.”37
THE COMMON TASK
“On the Problem of Brotherhood” is an extraordinary text, the title’s inordinate length itself suggestive of the inordinate central propositions that Fedorov advances.38 Of these, perhaps the easiest to address is the call for a wholly different attitude to human coexistence, the more or less perennially hackneyed call for unity in a common cause. Yet Fedorov transforms this hackneyed call into a call for revolution that is exhilarating, if not mad, in its sustained radicality.
Fedorov’s long text (almost three hundred pages in the most recent Russian edition) is divided into four parts.39 The first begins with a discussion of the terrible Russian famine of 1891. He describes one rather extreme attempt to combat famine: the use of explosives to make rain. Fedorov finds this use of explosives of substantial interest because it is an example of a radically different use of the explosives, as a means not of destroying others but of helping them to sustain themselves. Here a technology developed solely for the ends of conflict is transformed by being employed for a diametrically opposed end. This transformation is a crucial emblem of a different possible future for humanity, one in which the tremendous powers of technology are harnessed not for the purposes of mutual destruction but for the creation of a community that will outlast all other communities that have ever existed.
So far, this sort of thinking seems to move within the sphere of cliché, of endlessly repeated cries to tame the impulse to destroy and negate. But it is important to remember that these cries to tame the impulse to destroy and negate come largely as a result of another epochal transformation by which one of the greatest and most violent empires in recorded history, that of Rome, became an empire devoted to the Christian mission of creating a universal empire of peace, a city of God on earth.
Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Rome collapsed, and the promise of universal empire passed on to Byzantium and thence to Moscow—the third Rome. It is tolerably clear that this claim animates Fedorov’s text and his renewed call for transformation of the bellicose impulse into one establishing a universal empire that brings together all human beings in a common cause.
The claim for universal empire is hardly new; indeed, it is one of the most potent tropes of Western thought. Kojève himself fancifully attributes the rise of this trope to philosophy, specifically to the fact that the first truly universal conqueror of the West, Alexander of Macedon, was a student of Aristotle.40 For Fedorov, however, the claim for universal empire is not Aristotelian: it belongs squarely with the promise of Christ and—here is the radical turn—with the promise of resurrection. To put matters with summary bluntness: universal empire, for Fedorov, does not mean merely the acquisition of empire on earth, the fabled city of God, but acquisition of the greatest possible empire, that which extends beyond the earth to eternity: empire over our greatest foe, death. Human beings will only ever become truly human, truly brothers of the greatest human being, Christ, by accepting his invitation to divinity, by becoming one with God in resurrection.
Fedorov’s text is devoted to outlining a plan for achieving this end. The first point of that plan is already somewhat clear. The immense resources made available to us in the prosecution of war now must be channeled into the greatest war of all, against death itself. The second point of Fedorov’s plan is of considerable interest: he seeks to eliminate the distinction between theory and practice by eliminating any pursuit of the mind whose end is not the elimination of death, an eminently practical end.
The doctrine of resurrection could also be called positivism, but a positivism of action. According to this doctrine it would not be mythical knowledge that would be replaced by positive knowledge, but mythical, symbolic actions that would be replaced by actual, effective ones. The doctrine of resurrection sets no arbitrary limits to action performed in common, as opposed to action by separate individuals. This positivism of action derives not from mythology, which was a fabrication of pagan priests, but from mythological art forms, popular rituals and sacrifices. Resuscitation changes symbolic acts into reality. The positivism of action is not class-bound but popular positivism. For the people, science will be a method, whereas the positivism of science is merely a philosophy for scholars as a separate class or estate.41
Fedorov simply rejects the basic assumptions of Platonic thought that ensure the separation of theory and practice. This is a breathtaking move and merits more careful comment.
For Fedorov, theory is the result of a tacit admission of impossibility. One engages in theoretical work because there is a suspicion that that work may never have any impact at all on how human beings actually live—the mind is left to think in a vacuum because there is no connection between the mind in this respect and our material reality. Fedorov registers this difference by reference to two classes, the “learned” (ученые) and the “unlearned” (неученые). The learned are associated with theoretical, the unlearned with practical activities. Fedorov insists that the learned must leave behind their occupation with questions that do not pertain to practical issues of survival and human well-being. Indeed, by confronting these practical challenges, the learned come to join the unlearned in common agreement about the primacy of the practical so defined. The fusion of the learned and the unlea
rned in this immense practical task creates a further basis for community.
This is a shrewd move. On the one hand, Fedorov in effect reverses the relation of theory to practice as the precondition for its elimination. He does so by openly encouraging the “learned,” or what in the Russian context has typically been referred to as the “intelligentsia,” to become practical. Theory does not direct practice but becomes wholly directed to achieving practical ends. Fedorov thus simply reiterates one of the primary implications of modern Western thought, with the same end: technological mastery over nature. On the other hand, Fedorov eliminates what he considers the most pernicious division in society, one that is far more divisive than that between the wealthy and the impoverished. The startling proposition that the division between those who know and those who do not know is the root of inequality and conflict within a society is one of the most distinctive features of Fedorov’s thought. By ensuring that all work together on a reasonably equal basis in the production and diffusion of knowledge, for the realization of the ends of the common task, Fedorov seeks to eliminate the central cause of internal dissension in his new community.
The first two sections of Fedorov’s text outline thus the development of a community that eliminates dissent externally and internally through an all-absorbing dedication to the singular task of creating technologies that will enable empire over the earth. He refers to nature consistently as the “blind force” (слепая сила) and insists that this blind force be transformed by reason into a regulated force that may be exploited for the proper ends of the nascent brotherhood of humankind. Of course, the most important of these ends is the creation of technologies that eliminate all destructive forces—if the brotherhood in humankind has truly overcome enmity in itself, it seeks to impose the resulting harmony on nature and can only affirm its own harmonious quality by doing so. Nature, once so opposed to humanity, must become its intimate partner in the task of setting up the proper preconditions for the final task: universal resurrection.
It goes without saying that this universal resurrection does not apply to any other creature on earth. Fedorov’s common task applies to humankind alone and is not so much a partnership with nature as a massive project of the most radical domestication of nature imaginable—empire, indeed. While Fedorov uses bland bureaucratic terms like “regulation” (регуляция) to describe the project of turning the blind force of nature into a rational one, it is quite evident that this regulation means little more than transforming nature in accordance with the narrowly human end of unlimited self-preservation. What is rational is what serves self-preservation.42
This equation is astonishing in light of Fedorov’s consistent assertion of the properly Christian nature of the common task. Indeed, one of the most delicate aspects of Fedorov’s thought is the question of its orthodoxy. Both the assertion of fundamental enmity with nature and the exhortation to turn that enmity into friendship by actions that turn nature into a servant of human interests—primary among which is the interest in self-preservation—seem at first blush more consistent with diabolical rebellion against God. After all, the common task is tantamount to the correction of nature in accordance with human ends.43
Fedorov seems to dismiss this question by insisting that God granted us mastery over the earth so that we might use our freedom to transform it and thereby show our fealty to God. In this respect, there is a far more interesting and penetrating reason for Fedorov’s insistence on the Christian nature of the common task: the fact of resurrection itself. For Fedorov, Christ’s suffering and resurrection is a model narrative of the overcoming of servitude to nature and, in the final account, death. Fedorov suppresses the nagging question here: that resurrection seems to fulfill the inherently selfish interest in self-preservation that Christ otherwise overcomes by willingly dying. Fedorov clearly sees this problem nonetheless, and he attempts to deal with it rather more subtly (or madly, if you like) by turning the common task of overcoming nature into one devoted not just to the interests of one generation but to those of all generations that have ever lived on earth. This outrageously expanded common task becomes the very essence of morality for Fedorov. Devotion to the project of universal resurrection is evidently supposed to overcome the objection that the concerted effort to master nature reflects satanic pride and monstrous self-assertion rather than properly filial Christian piety.
The filial aspect of Fedorov’s common task cuts to the core of these thorny issues. Fedorov’s attempt to reconcile human selfishness and self-assertion with Christian self-abnegation comes out perhaps most clearly in his remarkable attempt to reconcile a primary expression of self-preservation, the family, with the notion of a universal community devoted to a task that somehow transcends self-preservation, the final community Fedorov seeks to ground and create.44
Fedorov employs two central metaphors, drawn from familial relations, to describe this community: brotherhood and kinship. If we may understand “brotherhood” as expressing the relation we have with our contemporaries in the common task, those with whom we work and live in devotion to the task of transforming nature from a blind force into a rational one, we may understand the term “kinship” as referring to the end of this task: universal resurrection. Fedorov is extremely clear about this. Universal resurrection is the proper expression of kinship because it establishes and affirms an attitude of devotion to one’s ancestors that far exceeds mere ancestor worship. The common task has two fundamental aspects in this respect, for the project of mastering nature is the fundamental precondition for the arguably more ambitious project of returning all our ancestors to life, of “becoming mature” or discarding our “immaturity,” as Fedorov argues at several spots.
Fedorov’s synthesis consists in his use of terms applicable to the family in furtherance of a universal common cause. He thus attempts to transform the family from a particular unit within a community to a universal one. This is of course a bold move, because it attempts to overcome the focus on narrow blood ties that led Plato to suggest that the family, as a necessarily exclusive biological unit, needs to be dissolved because it is potentially detrimental to the project of creating a universal community. As we all know, one of the most radical claims of the Republic is its insistence on suppressing ties of blood relation among the guardians, most notably in their holding offspring in common. Fedorov counters this concern by universalizing the family and providing it with a common, “familial” task.45 Fedorov decides for filial love in the place of divisive erotic love, which shall have no place (and is of course not necessary) in his new community.
Yet the objection I have already mentioned, that this “familial” task does not achieve true universality, cannot be ignored. One has to ascertain in what way communal self-assertion differs from individual self-assertion, and Fedorov does not deal with this issue directly. He seems to assume that selfishness is based essentially in material individuation, in the needs of my body as opposed to those of any other’s. Hence, the transition to a common project, if not the end, is in fact a graduated stage whereby the selfishness that hinges on our material, corporeal existence is at least initially projected onto a collectivity dedicated to eliminating the origin of that selfishness in toto. If the task is defined by its end, the initial stage of the common task is merely a stage that leads to a final, momentous transition, the “singularity,” whose principle feature—the eradication of death—eliminates the material condition of selfishness and thus selfishness itself, once and for all.46
If we may describe Fedorov’s project in stages—something Fedorov does not directly do—we arrive at the following:
Cessation of hostilities among different nations—the creation of a world state.
Cessation of enmity within the world state by eliminating the distinction between the “learned” and the “unlearned.”
Transformation of the world state into a brotherhood unified as such by two tasks: the regulation of nature and the preservation of ancestors.<
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Achievement of technological mastery over nature—regulation of and empire over the earth.
Achievement of perfect recuperation of history, the filial task of memory being the precondition to universal resurrection.
With universal resurrection, the establishment of a final community of deathless individuals, full recuperation and abolition of history, empire over death.
We have discussed the content of most of these stages already. It remains to clarify two points: Fedorov’s concept of history and the concept of universal resurrection itself. These two concepts are the main subject matter, respectively, of the third and fourth parts of Fedorov’s text.
Fedorov’s view of history is distinctive and is consistent with his focus on action. History understood as telling stories of the dead, as attempting to preserve their lives in memory—history, in other words, as a form of resurrecting the dead that remains purely metaphorical (воскрешение в смысле метафоры)—is history for the learned, those who have withdrawn from action, having succumbed to leaving the process of resurrection at metaphor only. History as a recuperation of the past, as a presencing of the past, as a way of cultivating memory, is little more than an admission of defeat in the face of death. This kind of history must be suppressed in the common task by a new kind of history that prepares the way for the literal resurrection of the dead by preserving as much as it is possible to preserve of them. History is a project that looks forward to the time when universal resurrection will be technically possible; history prepares for this moment and is indispensable to it.47
History in this new sense is a reflection of filial piety because it preserves the past not as a component of the present or as a way of understanding the present but for the sake of the past in itself. By preserving the past, we demonstrate our dedication to preserving our ancestors, not necessarily as we see them or as our forerunners—both attitudes that reflect the egoism of a generation that thinks its reality is first and foremost—but as it was for our ancestors. In short, we look back lovingly and grant the past equal dignity with our present or, as I have suggested, we imbue the present with the past, we “presence” or reanimate it. Hence Fedorov’s peculiar fascination with the museum and the archive as institutions whose genuine value resides in their reminding us of our duty to bring the past back to life, to recuperate the past not merely in memory (though this is itself a necessary beginning) but literally, through the discovery of a technology that can return this ostensibly lost life.