When Politics Gives Way to Physics

People who take pride in the same object can form a knightly order but not a brotherhood of loving sons. However, as soon as pride in the exploits of the fathers is replaced by grief over their death, we will begin to perceive the Earth as a graveyard and nature as a death-bearing force. Then politics will yield to physics, which cannot be separated from astronomy. Then the Earth will be seen as a heavenly body and the stars as so many earths. The convergence of all sciences in astronomy is a...

 Reflection is Destructive

So long as scientists and philosophers remain a caste, even the problem of morality, that is, of behaviour, will remain for them one of cognition and not of activity, a subject for study and not for practical application, something that just happens rather than something that must be done and, furthermore, done not by individuals but collectively. So long as scholars are not prepared to become a Commission for the elaboration of a plan of common action (and without this mankind cannot act a...

 The Common Task

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 owin...

 Kantianism is a School and Not a Culture

Critical philosophy – Kantianism and neo-Kantianism – is also a school and not a solution. The Critique of Pure Reason can be said to deal with science or philosophy only within the narrow limits of an artificial, particularised experience (confined to laboratory or academic study). Similarly, the Critique of Practical Reason can be said to deal with life only within the narrow limits of personal affairs and within the kind of disunity that is not regarded as vice; it is a moral code fo...

 Russian Transhumanism

Russia has always been considered a hotbed of utopias, both from above and from below, that is: State and intelligentsia (think of Peter the Great, Nikolai Chernyshevskii‘s socialist-utopian novel "What‘s to be Done" or Dostoevskii‘s ideal man Count Myshkin, the Idiot) – and at the same time there was a strong milleniarism among the people, a religious zeal leading to a variety of sects, peasant and folk beliefs resulting sometimes in bizarre mass movements. (Skoptsy) (This history h...