Candles in the Dark: A New Spirit for a Plural World

Chapter 10: Towards Noosphere

CHAPTER 10 TOWARDS NOOSPHERE Vyacheslav Ivanov In the 1920s, Teilhard de Chardin [1881-1955] and Vladimir Vemadsky [1863-1945] developed the concept "noosphere." It emerged in an exchange of ideas between these two great minds, while the latter was lecturing at the Sorbonne, after fleeing the Russian communist regime.! Building upon Vemadsky's notion of biosphere as a living envelope of the Earth, Teilhard de Chardin, together with his friend, Le Roy, a philosopher of Bergsonian orientation and a mathematician, fell upon the idea of a noosphere.2 "Noosphere" is a neologism formed from the Greek noos (meaning mind, intelligence, understanding, thought) and designates a thinking layer superimposed on the biosphere, a new fIlm or membrane on the earth's surface.3 Chardin described the "noosphere" as "une sphere de fa reflection, d'invention consciente, de l'union sentie des ames" (a sphere of thought, of the conscious invention, of the heart-felt union of souls).4 Chardin thus describes how the noosphere came to be: As a result of some 'hominizing' cerebral mutation, which appears among the anthropoids towards the end of the Tertiary period, psychic reflection-not simply 'knowing' but 'knowing that one knows'-bursts upon the world and opens up an entirely new domain for evolution. With man (apparently no more than a new zoological 'family') it is a second species oflife that begins, bringing with it its new cycle ofpossible patterns of arrangement and its own special planetary envelope (the noosphere).5 187 VVACHESLAV IVANOV As this passage from de Chardin indicates, the most crucial element in the development of the noosphere is the human capacity for selfreflective thought. In December of 1958, the British biologist, Julian Huxley, another friend of Chardin's, verging on a similar discovery remarked: 6 In 1925, Teilhard coined the term noosphere to denote the sphere ofmind, as opposed to, or rather superposed on, the biosphere or sphere of life, and acting as a transforming agency promoting hominisation (or as I would put it, progressive psychosocial evolution). He may perhaps be criticized for not defining the term more explicitly. By noosphere did he intend simply the total pattern of thinking organisms (i.e., human beings) and their activity, including the patterns of their interrelationships: or did he intend the special environment of man, the systems of organized thought and its products in which men move and have their being, as fish swim and reproduce in rivers and the sea? Perhaps it might have been better to restrict noosphere to the first-named sense, and to use something like noosystem for the second. But certainly noosphere is a valuable and thought-provoking word.7 Orthodox Father, Pavel Florensky [1882-1937], "another Russian scholar and thinker personally linked to Vernadsky, also developed his thoughts on the biosphere incorporating the noosphere in an original way. In a letter to Vemadsky written in 1929; Florensky wrote: There exists in, or perhaps on, the biosphere what may be called pneumatosphere, that is a special part of a substance that has been drawn into the cycle of culture, or more exactly, the cycle of spirit. Undoubtedly, this cycle is not the same as the general life cycle. But there is a large amount ofdata, admittedly not yet sufficiently worked out, which points to a special kind of stability shown by material formations created by spirit, for example, objects of art.g Suggesting a special term "pneumatosphere" from the Greek pneuma, meaning soul or spirit, as opposed to the material body in Pauline religious philosophy, Florensky stresses how the symbolic function of an object transforms the object materially. This 188 T aWARDS NaaSPHERE refers to the process of transformation of the material aspect of a symbol or a sign in the semiotic sense, as it is influenced by the symbolized aspect. Florensky was particularly interested, for example, in the material differences between Orthodox icons and other objects of a similar kind.9 He considered how, because transformed by a system of meanings, colors in icons differ from the same colors in another type of artistic painting. The development of semiotics has made it possible to study this particular part of the noosphere. Introducing yet another noospheric type analogy to the biosphere in Vemadsky's sense, Yurii Lotman [1922-1993], a Russian semiotician, found that all the signs and different semiotic systems of culture might be considered to constitute a "semiosphere."10 189 VVACHESLAV IVANOV Before his...