Humanity and the Disruption of the Cosmos: How Berdyaev Foresaw our Reliance on Machines
Keywords:
Religion, Atheism, Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, TechnologyAbstract
In his final work, the Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar (1952), Nikolai Berdyaev categorized five historical periods on the relationship between humanity and nature. This meta-historical framework was articulated due to his concern about an obstructive imbalance between spirituality, materialism, and modern industrial technology. This essay overviews the framework and considers it with relation to eras subsequent his passing. It finds that Berdyaev's projection was not only theoretically plausible, but turned out to be remarkably accurate in predicting the transition from a technical industrial society to one based around autonomous spheres of operation including the internet and artificial intelligence. The final stage of the fourth period, our current era, was predicted by Berdyaev to be marked by a new form of global subjugation – in the merging of technology with the state and our enslavement to our own discoveries. Attention is also given to a future, eschatological fifth period in which Berdyaev believed a spiritual revolution would accompany widespread dissolution of state power and the emancipation of labor.
References
Berdyaev, N. The Nightmare of an Evil Good. Journal Put', jun-jul. No. 4, 103-116, 1926. Accessible at: http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1926_312.html
Berdyaev, N. Solitude and Society, tr. George Reavey. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938.
Berdyaev, N. The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar. Trans. by Donald A. Lowrie. London: Victor Gollancz, 1952.
Berdyaev. N. The Meaning of the Creative Act. Trans. by Donald A. Lowrie. London: Victor Gollancz, 1955.
Berdyaev. N. Truth and Revelation. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1953.
Blitz, Mark. ‘Understanding Heidegger on technology.’ The New Atlantis, pp. 63-80, 2014.
Bostrom, N. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2014.
Bourke, V. J. ‘The Gnosticism of N. Berdyaev’s Thought’. Fordham University Quarterly 11, no. 3: 409-422, 1936.
Calian, C. S. The Significance of Eschatology in the Thoughts of Nicolas Berdyaev. Brill Archive, 1965.
Dreyfus, H. L. ‘Heidegger on gaining a free relation to technology’. Technology and values, 41-54, 1997.
Dye, J. W. ‘Nikolai Berdyaev and His Ideas on the Fundamental Nature of All Entities’. Ultimate Reality and Meaning, 2, pp. 109-134, 1979.
Fakhrutdinov, R. ‘Doomsday Machine: Poseidon’. December 29, 2018. Gazeta.ru accessible at: https://www.gazeta.ru/army/2018/12/29/12113839.shtml
Faure, J. 2021. ‘A Russian version of reactionary modernism: Aleksandr Prokhanov’s ‘spiritualization of technology’. Journal of Political Ideologies, 1-24, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2021.1885591
Goncharov, V. V. (2016). Mesto cheloveka v sisteme ontologicheskih prinzcipov globalnovo konstituoynalisma. Philosofskaya Mysl. 9, pp. 86-100, 2016.
Gordon, S. 2012."Existential time and the meaning of human development." The Humanistic Psychologist 40, no. 1, pp. 79-86, 2012.
Harold, P. ‘The desire for social unity: Levinas and Berdyaev’. Philosophy Today, 54, no. 3: 247-264, 2010.
Hartshorne, C. ‘Whitehead and Berdyaev: Is There Tragedy in God?’. The Journal of Religion, 37, no. 2: pp. 71-84, 1957.
Heidegger, M. ‘Bremen and Freiburg lectures’. Trans. Andrew J. Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
Herberg, W. Four Existentialist Theologians. A Reader from the works of Jacques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich, New York, 1957.
Israel, J.I., The Enlightenment that Failed: Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748-1830. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Kantor, V. K. Berdyaev on Dostoevsky: Theodicy and Freedom, Russian Studies in Philosophy, 53, no. 4, pp. 324-337, 2015.
Kiseleva, M. S. ‘Understanding History: The Decisions of Nikolai Berdyaev’. Russian Studies in Philosophy 53, no. 4, pp. 305-323, 2015.
Lowrie, D. Christian Existentialism. A Berdyaev Anthology, New York, 1965.
McLachlan, J. The Desire to be God. Freedom and the Other, Satre and Berdyaev, New York, 1992.
Medzibrodszky, A. "NF Fedorov’s Place in Russian Intellectual History." PhD diss., Central European University, 2014.
Porus, V. N. ‘Nikolai Berdyaev on the “Spirits of the Russian Revolution’. Russian Studies in Philosophy 55, no. 3-4: pp. 210-226, 2017.
Riehm KE, Feder KA, Tormohlen KN. ‘Associations Between Time Spent Using Social Media and Internalizing and Externalizing Problems Among US Youth.’ JAMA Psychiatry 76, no. 12, pp. 1266–1273, 2019.
Slesinski, R. ‘Berdyaev and the Relation of Sex, Love and Marriage’. In Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, vol. 60, pp. 245-252, 1986.
Stoeber, M.Evil and the Mystics’ God: Towards a Mystical Theodicy. New York, NY: Springer, 1992.
Tarasov, A. N. ‘NA Berdyaev o roli iskustva v otrazheni proczessa sozckulturni transformacsii’. Sovremenniye Problemi Nauki I Obrozovaniya. 6, pp. 298-298, 2011. Retrieved from: https://s.science-education.ru/pdf/2011/6/203.pdf
Tucker, S. D. Space Oddities: Our Strange Attempts to Explain the Universe. Gloucestershire, UK: Amberley Publishing Limited, 2017.
Trufanova, E. O. ‘Philosophy of technology in Russia: origins, history, current picture.’ Mechane, pp. 191-208, 2020. Retrieved from
https://mimesisjournals.com/ojs/index.php/mechane/article/view/334
Valliere, P. Modern Russian Theology. Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Orthodox Theology in a New Key Edinburgh, Clark T&T, 2000.
Vishnyakova, O. ‘Russian nihilism: The cultural legacy of the conflict between fathers and sons’. Comparative and Continental Philosophy 3, no. 1, pp. 99-111, 2011.
Wendland, Aaron James, Christopher Merwin, and Christos Hadjioannou, eds. Heidegger on technology. Routledge, 2018.
Wright, D. 1962."The Philosophy of Berdyaev."Learning for Living 1, no. 3: 13-16.
Young, G. M. (2012). The Russian cosmists: The esoteric futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and his followers. Oxford University Press.
Zhukova, O. A. 2015. "The Philosophy of New Spirituality: The Creative Manifesto of Nikolai Berdyaev."Russian Studies in Philosophy 53, no. 4: 276-290.
Downloads
Published
Versions
- 30-12-2021 (2)
- 30-12-2021 (1)
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Alexei Anisin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
