Community as the Source of Vernadsky's Concept of Noosphere

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945) was already in his sixties when he started to elaborate his concept of noosphere, but he had been making his way toward it since the beginning of his creative career. 1 According to Vernadsky, the noosphere is “a new evolutionary condition” of the biosphere, in which “the geological role of humanity is the dominant.” When speaking of the initial stages of the transition to the noosphere, he characterizes it as “the biosphere’s geological stage that we [currently] experience”; when speaking of the later ones, he defines it as “that stage of the biosphere which we are approaching.” He also suggests several other complementary “definitions” of the noosphere—accentuating, in different contexts, this or that aspect of the notion (e.g., temporal, spatial, structural). 2

Analyzing the ecological and, to a greater degree, the social prerequisites for entering into the noosphere, Vernadsky proceeded from evidence of global upheavals in both the natural and social orders and sought the actual imperatives arising before the one and indivisible, albeit heterogeneous, humanity. He saw as imperative a commonwealth of states uniting all humanity (which, in his opinion, would by no means require a uniform social order all over the world), to effect the establishment of a global center of scientific thought, the eradication of wars and famine, the search for new sources of energy and nutrition, and the encouragement of responsible family planning as a means to influencing population. He believed these tendencies were emerging despite the willful desires and actions of individuals (in particular, politicians) and of the masses.

It was to science that he ascribed a special role in the transition to the noosphere. Vernadsky regarded science as having the strongest universal binding force and as being the only realm in which humanity has appeared to make continuous progress. He saw an unprecedented outburst of scientific thought in the twentieth century, “a radical turn of worldview by humans,” and “the recognition of the noosphere as the goal.”

In the social-psychological aspect, the transition to the noosphere presupposes, in Vernadsky’s view, “the community of all humanity, of humans as brethren”; 3 in the same vein, when referring to science of the future, he speaks of “new forms of scholarly brotherhood.” 4 One can clearly trace through his works belonging to different years the author’s interest in “the comradely, brotherly element” in scientific organizations of the past and the present, which pave the way to the noosphere. 5 As Vernadsky saw it, brotherhood should become the principle of relations between scholars and subsequently between all people on earth.

This impels us, in search of the sources of Vernadsky’s concept of noosphere, to highlight the following well-known excerpt from his reminiscences: “The first and foremost place in my life has been and is occupied by scientific quest, scientific work, free scientific thought, and the creative seeking and striving for truth by the individual. Coupled with this is the fact that my life was going on in a peculiar communal moral envelope that left an ineffaceable imprint on the whole of it—in a close friendly circle of the Brotherhood.” 6

Vernadsky and the circle of his close friends constitute a special chapter in the history of Russian culture. The Brotherhood (or the Priyutino brotherhood) is the circle’s self-appellation; it was in existence from the 1880s to the 1940s.

In 1937, D. I. Shakhovskoi, the closest of Vernadsky’s friends, meditating upon the life of another friend of theirs, the deceased S. F. Ol’denburg, wrote words that can be applied to every member of the Brotherhood:

Tonight I have been thinking of Sergei and our “friendship.” And it has been clear to me, and it remains clear now, that therein lay the central point of all Sergei’s life-story. “Friendship” was not an episode; it was the real programme of life. And this programme concerned, not just the affairs of a small group, but the most general matters—the whole world....I always felt that...