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George M. YoungCenter for Global HumanitiesUniversity of New EnglandPortland, Maine, USAgyoung02@maine.rr.com

SOCRATES OR FEDOROV

КОНСПЕКТ

Джордж Янг «Федоров или Сократ»

Федорова часто называют <Московским Сократом,> и как показывает О.В. Марченко в отличной статье, это прозвание прекрасно описывает образ жизни Федорова. Но я бы предлагал, что самые идеи Федорова и Сократа, содержания их филофофий, диаметрально противноположны. Это особенно ясно в противоположных объяснениях дельфийского оракула <Познай самого себя> и в противоположных отношениях к смерти. По Сократу, противопосавлять против смерти значит, что мы ошибочно верим, что знаем то, чего мы не знаем. Кто знает, спрашивает Сократ, может быть смерть хорошая вещь? По Федорову, смерть является исключительным на свете злом , и надо направлять все человеческие усилия, силы, разум, и дело, чтобы уничтожать смерть на земле и в космосе, для людей настоящих, прошлых, и будущих. Итак, Федоров и Сократ, показывающие подобный образ жизни, отвечают не просто различно, а даже несовместно на некоторые из самых трудных, фундамелтальных , и важных вопросов в умственной истории.

ABSTRACT

Fedorov has often been referred to as “The Moscow Socrates.” This is certainly, as O.V. Marchenko and others have so well demonstrated, an accurate term to describe his

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manner of life. But I would submit that the ideas that Fedorov and Socrates lived for are diametrically opposed. This is particularly evident in their contrasting interpretations of the Delphic injunction to “Know Thyself,”and in their contrasting attitudes to the idea of death. For Socrates, to fear or oppose death is to act as if we know what we do not know. Perhaps death is even a good thing. For Fedorov, death is the one great evil in the universe, and all human thought and effort should be directed toward eliminating death for all past, present, andfuture humanity. Fedorov and Socrates, then, while living in a similar manner, offer incompatible solutions to two of the fundamental problems in intellectual history.

From the earliest obituaries and commentaries to the

very recent, one of the most common sobriquets applied to

Fedorov is “The Moscow Socrates.” And as a description of

Fedorov’s way of life, a more apt phrase would be difficult

to imagine. He is probably the best Russian representative

of what O.V. Marchenko has called “European Socratism,”1 a

line of Socratic figures that might include Diogenes of

Sinope, Pierre Abelard, Confucius (if allowed as an

“honorary” or “adopted” European) , Kant, and Skovoroda, to

name just a few. What at least Fedorov, if not all these

thinkers, might share with Socrates, and “the Socratic way

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of life,” is a clarity of purpose, a single-minded devotion

to a truth, a personal indifference to the cares and

comforts of everyday life, a preference for oral instead of

written transmission of their teachings , reliance on

friends and disciples to propagate their ideas, and – most

important – integrity of thought and action, the life as a

perfect reflection of the teaching. On these counts,

Fedorov’s way of life probably more nearly approaches the

Socratic model than that of any of the other figures

Marchenko names.

Marchenko does not ignore Fedorov’s rejection of

Socrates and his teachings, -- indeed, the article includes

several passages from Fedorov that illustrate that

rejection. But throughout his article, Marchenko’s

emphasis is on what the two thinkers share rather than on

their differences. In this brief essay, I would like to do

the opposite: admit their many similarities, but emphasize

the differences. For despite living what has been superbly

described, by Sergei Bulgakov, O.V. Marchenko, Svetlana

Semenova, and others, as a “Socratic Way of Life,”

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(sokraticheskii obraz zhizni), Fedorov and Socrates lived

for very different ideas. Indeed, it would be difficult to

name any two thinkers more at odds with one another -- not

in the manner but in the content of their teachings -- than

Fedorov and Socrates. Two of the most important differences

between them lie, first, in their interpretation of the

Delphic oracle’s injunction to “Know Thyself,” and, second,

in their attitude toward death. As I hope to show, these

differences separate not simply two individual thinkers from

different periods and cultures, but reveal a fundamental

division of mind, two wholly different worldviews, each

consistent and complete within itself, each retaining its

appeal into our own time, but each standing in diametrical

opposition to the other.

Fedorov states the difference between the Socratic,

western “Know Thyself” as it has unfolded in the history of

European philosophy, and his “projective” interpretation of

the same injunction as it “ought to be” in the common human

1 O.V. Marchenko, “K Istorii Evropeiskogo Sokratizma: N.F. Fedorov,” inSuzhitel’ dukha vechnoi pamiati:Nikolai Fedorivich Fedorov. K 180-letiu so dhia rozhdeniia. Sbornik nauchnykh statei, Pashkov dom, Moscow, 2010

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task of the future. “ ‘Know thyself’ ( do not, therefore,

trust the fathers, i.e. tradition, do not trust the witness

of others, or of brothers, know only thyself,) says the

demon, (Delphic or Socratic.) ‘I know, therefore I exist,’

answers the Cartesian, i.e. as Fichte elucidates: ‘I --

one knowing am also one existing; everything else is

merely the known, i.e. what is thought, therefore, not

existing’. And thus: ‘Adore thyself with all thy soul,

with all thine heart’ cry out Stirner and Nietzsche, i.e.

find thyself within thyself, be alone and recognize nothing

beyond thyself.”

The alternative, Fedorov writes, is: “’Know thyself in

the fathers, and the fathers in thyself, and be a

brotherhood of sons;’ then judgment (criticism) will be

changed into atonement, atonement not in word only, but in

deed, i.e. in the act of resurrecting, and then we will in

truth be followers of Christ.”2

2 N.F. Fedorov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, Moscow, 1995, I, 394. Future citations will give volume and page number in parentheses in the body of the text.

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Fedorov, then, views Socrates and the Delphic

inscription as the source of the entire tradition of

progressive western intellectual individualism and

degenerative mental isolation. Self knowledge in the

Socratic tradition, he argues, becomes solipsistic,

knowledge only of oneself, and constitutes a logical

rejection of all intellectual, social, and family ties.

Socratic self knowledge, as Fedorov interprets it, stands as

the opposite of sobornost,’ the Slavophile ideal of

spiritual consensus, communal identity, which Fedorov would

extend into an ideal of universal kinship and spiritual

harmony.

Socrates’s own understanding of “Know thyself,” was

quite different from the interpretation Fedorov attributed

to him. Socrates, at least as he was presented in the

most nearly biographical of Plato’s works, the Apology,

Crito, and Phaedo, believed that man was a composite

being, and to “know himself” meant to know not only his

mortal, biological, and social selves, but his ideal,

immortal self as well, to know himself not only in his

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present life as an Athenian, but also to know himself in the

Pythagorean sense, as one who lived before and will live

after his current incarnation. Socrates holds that if we

know ourselves completely, we will follow the higher,

better, immortal component of our composite nature and

ignore the lower, animal and social components. Full self

knowledge, then, may isolate the one who knows himself from

the many who do not know themselves, may set the true

philosopher against his less philosophical fellow citizens,

and, perhaps more dangerously, set them against him. Even

if it means social condemnation and a sentence of death,

Socrates views the earthly isolation of the philosopher, the

social separation of the one from the many, as a good thing

for the philosopher, who may now be at odds with the

citizenry but is at one with the gods, the truth, and all

that is immortal. The Socratic solution to the problem of

the philosopher’s isolation is not for the philosopher to

stop philosophizing, but for him to continue, so that now a

few and perhaps eventually many may participate in the

immortalizing process of philosophy. The Socratic method of

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dialectic, practiced in the agora and open to anyone who

dares to participate, is the means by which the many, if

willing, may indeed begin the practice of questioning and

answering that can lead one toward truth and immortality.

In the Apology Socrates gives even his false accusers the

opportunity to engage in a dialectic in the courtroom that

could lead them to the truth in the case, an opportunity

which they fail to avail themselves of, more to their

eternal discredit, Socrates prophetically observes, than to

his.

Fedorov is correct, then, is arguing that the first

principle of Socratic teaching is separation and isolation,

the superiority of the one to the many. For in the Crito,

and in nearly every other dialogue, a question that Socrates

is bound to ask, in one form or another, is: “In questions

of just and unjust, fair and foul, good and evil, which are

the subjects of our present consultation, ought we to follow

the opinion of the many and to fear them; or the opinion of

the one man who has understanding?”3 And always, whether

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the question is of who best knows the true and the just or

who best knows the making of boots or the training of dogs

and horses, the cooperative interlocutor answers: “Why the

one, of course, Socrates, and not the many.”

In the myth of the cave in Book VII of The Republic,

the positive character is the one man who leaves the cave

and learns the truth and, on returning, suffers at the hands

of the negative collective, the many ignorant prisoners who

remained chained in the cave. In every opposition of the

individual to the collective, the initiate to the

unenlightened rest, Socrates coaxes his follower to

conclude that it is the one who is in the right.

To Fedorov, whose great themes are relatedness

(rodstvo,) family ties of brotherhood and sonship, Socrates

speaks not in the name of any true god but in the voice of a

seditious demon, and the western tradition of individualism

that follows leads only to a hell of isolation of the

particle, disintegration of the whole, and individual,

societal, cultural, environmental, and planetary death.

For Fedorov, the claim to a separate identity is a sign of

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immaturity. The mature individual recognizes that his own

identity intimately derives from the identity of his

fathers, and the father’s identity is realized in the child

– a concept reinforced by the continued common use of the

patronymic in Russian. In Fedorov, and perhaps generally

in the Russian tradition of thought, (Dostoevsky’s

Underground Man one of the notable exceptions) one is not

most himself or herself when he or she stands as an isolated

entity above and apart from the immediate larger human

family, but when he or she contributes as a part of a

greater whole. Henry David Thoreau’s famous saying: “If a

man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is

because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the

music which he hears, however measured or far away.4” would

probably elicit a smile and a nod from Socrates, but a stern

frown and shake of the head from Fedorov.

For Fedorov, the isolated individual convinced of his

superiority naturally tends toward judgment and criticism of

others, not creativity or atonement for his own

shortcomings. By changing ideal knowledge from self-

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knowledge to knowledge of all by all, Fedorov would hope to

close the separation between the “learned” and the

“unlearned,” and transform what he considered to be pagan

intellectual arrogance into atonement and Christian

humility. Socrates believed that our innate conscience is a

manifestation of the immortal part of the self, an inner

voice from the god, telling us not so much what we should be

doing, but warning us when we are doing what we should not

be doing. Fedorov also believed that we possess an innate

conscience, but for him it is more specific: a constant

reminder of “the shame of birth,” and “the duty to the

fathers.” “The consciousness that our birth costs our

fathers their lives, that we displace them, is a

consciousness of our guilt.” (I, 96) A motto that Fedorov

repeats throughout his writings is: “One needs to live not

for himself (egoism) and not for others (altruism), but with

all and for all; and this is the unification of the living

(sons) for the sake of resurrecting the dead (fathers.” (I,

110.)

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An important part of the interpretation of “Know

thyself” pertains to the interpretation of the idea of

freedom. For Socrates, “Know thyself” frees one to follow

the inner voice, the immortal part within, the divine guide,

if necessary against the opinion and will of the majority of

one’s fellow citizens. For Fedorov, this freedom leads

directly to disintegration and destruction: “Socrates,

although even acting in the name of the Delphic god,

nevertheless transferred the oracle from Parnassus into

consciousness, into everyone’s personal opinion (in the

famous ‘know thyself’ i.e. know only thyself), and as a

result of the removal from the heights of Parnassus of the

oracle that united the Greeks and directed their actions,

the Greeks attained complete freedom, i.e., Greece destroyed

itself.” (I, 166) For Plato’s Socrates5, the individual’s

freedom to follow his conscience, pursue true knowledge, and

strengthen the immortal part of himself – all this is more

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important than being at one with family and fellow citizens.

For Fedorov the opposite is true: the individual,

especially the better individual, can never find happiness

until he makes himself a genuine brother to all the living,

and acts with all other sons and daughters to discharge

their common debt to the deceased parents and ancestors.

For Fedorov, individual freedom to do as one pleases is an

illusion: the only true freedom will come when everyone is

freed from disease, poverty, ignorance, and death. For

Fedorov it is a matter of maturity and immaturity. The

Nietzschean overman, pushing individual freedom to its

logical extreme, is in Fedorov’s view the “eternal

adolescent,” the great grandchild of Socrates. The mature

person is the son or daughter who recognizes the obligation

to restore life to those from whom he or she took life.

Freedom, then, for Fedorov, can come only through action

based on a recognition of obligation, and only through the

liberation of all from forces that imprison all. Though not

exclusively a Russian view, Fedorov , I think correctly,

points out that a collectivist instinct, a tendency to rank

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brotherhood above equality and well above individual

freedom, is a Russian trait that is often expressed in the

Russian homeland (otechestvennaia) tradition of thought and

differentiates it from the western tradition. Chaadaev, for

example, who in many ways set the topics and defined the

terms for nearly two hundred years of philosophical

conversation in Russia, writes: “ Does man do anything his

life long but seek to submit to something? ….What would

happen if man could make himself so submissive that he

wholly rid himself of freedom? Clearly, according to what

we have said, this would be the highest degree of human

perfection. Every movement of his soul would then be

produced by the principle which produced all other movements

of the world. Thus, instead of being separated from nature,

as he now is, man would fuse with it. Instead of the

feeling of his own will, which separates him from the

general order of things, which makes him a being apart, he

would find the feeling of universal will, or, what is the

same thing, the intimate feeling, the profound awareness of

his real relation to the whole of creation.6”

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Fedorov states the same idea succinctly: “freedom to

live only for oneself is a great evil.” (I,186.) And in

another passage, he speaks directly about the duty of the

one toward the many: “Not granting oneself the right to

separate oneself from the mass of people (the crowd) we are

not able to set ourselves a goal which would not be general,

an assignment for all… There is only one doctrine which

requires not separation, but reunification, which sets for

itself not artificial goals, but one common, perfectly

natural goal for all – and that is the doctrine of kinship.”

(I, 43-44)

On questions of knowledge, freedom, and the one versus

the many, then, Socrates and Fedorov take contrasting

positions. But the most profound difference between them

concerns their understanding of death. We recall the last

words Socrates utters as he leaves his friends in the

Apology: “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our

ways – I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only

knows.7”

7 The Works of Plato, op.cit., p. 88.

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Fedorov also knows. For him, death is not simply the

end of an individual’s life, but a natural force of

disintegration and destruction at work throughout the

universe. Death happens because we do not fulfill our God-

given duty to regulate nature. Fedorov was probably the

first important thinker anywhere to argue that death is not

inevitable but conditional, an event that man can and

should control and eventually eliminate from the cosmos.

Fedorov believes that human control over nature and death is

God’s plan, built into the universe. By allowing nature to

have her way and death to devour all, we are shirking our

duty and acting as less than the creatures God created us to

be. Fedorov assigns enormous power and enormous

responsibility to the faculty of human reason. We are blind

nature’s eyes, irrational nature’s reasoning intellect, but

we have allowed ourselves to be nature’s victims. Thus in

Fedorov human reason comes with an obligation to apply that

reason not only to our own conduct but to the operations of

nature throughout the universe.

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Socrates deliberately refused to speculate on the

nature of the universe, on whether water, air, or fire, flux

or the atom, was the basis for everything, the topic that

dominated the speculations of his Hellenic predecessors. In

contrast, Fedorov states clearly and simply that nature is

the force of disintegration dominant in the world “as it

is,” and human reason is the counter force that needs to be

applied for the world “as it ought to be.” In Socrates,

true knowledge is an absolute, which we participated in

before we were born, lost at birth, and may gradually

reacquire and “re-member” through the dialectical process of

questions and answers, eliminating all that proves itself

false until we are left face to face with the true. For

Fedorov, truth is “projective,” a task of making real

through our labors an ideal cosmos which now exists merely

in concept, in potential, the realization of which God

created as our assignment. Socrates tells us to work on

ourselves, Fedorov to work on ourselves and also on

everything that is not ourselves.

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For Socrates, to fear death is to fear what we do not

know. As he explains in the Apology, death may be one of

two things: either an oblivion, which he says should be no

more to be feared than a sound sleep; or a passing to

another world, in which all ancient traditions tell us we

shall reap what we have sown, and in which he, as one who

has spent his life in philosophical conversations, would

look forward to conversing with the shades of Homer, Hesiod,

Odysseus, and other great conversationalists – and for

Socrates, no prospect could be more attractive. The fear of

death, then, is a form of hubris, a claim to know what we do

not know, namely, that death is something negative, to be

dreaded and for as long as possible avoided. Socrates

knows that he does not know – the Delphic oracle has told

him that that makes him the wisest of the Hellenes. And

wisdom tells him that he should neither seek death or avoid

it, but accept it with good cheer when it comes.

In a brief article “A Boulevard Apology for Death” (II,

204-206), Fedorov attacks not Socrates and his acceptance

of death, but Jean Finot (1858-1922), a French author of a

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book on happiness, who argued that fear of death could be a

factor in the brevity of life, and that by eliminating our

fear of death and the stress accompanying it, we might

extend the normal lifespan to two hundred years. Fedorov

responds: “Let us suppose (no matter how difficult to

admit) that death is not evil. But how can we separate it

from all that causes pain and loss, that reduces strength,

ability, that destroys life? Not recognizing death as evil

means not recognizing anything as evil, except life itself.

Such, in full accord with this point of view, posits

Buddhism.” While Finot does not entirely share Buddhism’s

pessimistic view of existence, Fedorov says, the French

expert on happiness makes only the weakest attempt to

counter the force that spoils all “joie de vivre.” Finot

urges us to attempt to console ourselves to death, to

appease it, rather than actively oppose it. But death

exists because man takes a passive attitude toward inner and

outer perfection, and death will rule as long as people

remain merely thoughtful and sensitive, but not active.

“Instead of a courageous call to do battle with death, they

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childishly advise not to look at it, to refrain from a well

considered analysis of its reasons and consequences. Finot

says nothing, for example, about death as something that

people mutually inflict upon each other: but indeed, when

it involves “moral” creatures, is it not still an evil?

And death, when it results from malice, is not that also

evil?” Finot and others like him speak of happiness and

love for life, Fedorov says, but how can we be happy with a

process that takes away the ones we love – our family, our

friends, all people on earth? Love and happiness, for

Fedorov, can mean only the restoration of life, not the

consolation for its loss.

In the Phaedo, Socrates spends his last hours on earth

explaining that philosophy itself is a slow act of dying.

Philosophy teaches us to remove our attention from things

apprehended by the senses to things apprehended by the mind.

This process of abstraction is a gradual movement away from

this world toward another higher world. Death is the final

step in this lifelong process, the permanent separation of

the soul from the body it now inhabits, and the re-entry of

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the soul into the bodiless immortal realm it occupies

between earthly incarnations. Death, then, is not

something the philosopher should attempt to avoid, but the

ultimate liberation from the body and the material world

from which the Socratic philosopher has all along been

taking small incremental steps.

Fedorov, too, views western philosophy as it has been

practiced since Socrates as a kind of death. For Fedorov,

however, this is not a positive movement toward liberation

and immortality, but merely the intellectual version of the

natural tendency of all things toward separation,

disintegration, and death. Western philosophy, for Fedorov,

is a way toward death because it represents a separation of

thought from action, learned from unlearned, theory from

practice. The reflective philosophy in the world “as it is”

should become projective philosophy in the world “as it

ought to be”, reintegrating thought and action, science and

faith, learned and unlearned, ideal and reality.

In his dialogues, Socrates emphasizes that other world

which we must constantly try to keep in mind and reach for.

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Gradually, through philosophy, we learn to ignore and

eventually leave this imperfect world and reunite with that

other world, purer and higher. Fedorov argues that that

other world is simply an idea, unreal, unless we work to

make it real for ourselves here on our turf and in our time.

Certainly we and our universe must change in order for the

ideal to become real, but Fedorov insists that that change

must be rational, according to our choice, and under our

direction, rather than driven by blind natural force.

Philosophy, for Fedorov, should not teach us how best to

leave this world of sticks, stones, flesh, and blood for a

better one of immortal beauty and truth, but show us how to

remake our universe of chaotic natural force into a holy,

rational cosmos. It is, in general terms, the difference

between transcendence without leaving or altering the agora,

and transfiguration with everyone rolling up their sleeves

and pitching in. Put another way, should we wake up and

change this world, or patiently, wisely prepare for the

next?

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Today, both philosophies still have their appeal and

their adherents. Both in Russia and in the west, Cosmism,

transhumanism, immortalism and other futuristic combinations

of activist, theurgical science have updated and extended

many of Fedorov’s basic ideas, sometimes (especially in the

west) without realizing where the ideas originally came

from. At the same time, theosophists, anthroposophists,

Rosicrucians, and many other more recent New Age thinkers

have continued on the sometimes esoteric, always

transcendent path which may have begun in Egypt or India

and may have been transmitted by Orpheus and Pythagoras, but

which is most familiar today as that advocated by Plato’s

Socrates.

In conclusion, we should observe that despite their

very different philosophical positions on death, both

thinkers spent their last hours in this life in a remarkably

similar manner. Neither Socrates nor Fedorov showed any

fear or anxiety about what would come, and both continued to

discuss philosophical matters as long as strength allowed.

Socrates, before swallowing the hemlock, was curious about

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how it would work, and asked the jailer about the effects

just as he might ask a carpenter about carpentry or a cook

about cookery. And after swallowing the poison, he reported

its progress to his friends, how his feet, then his legs,

then his middle grew numb, and finally he himself pulled the

blanket over his face, then pulled it back down when he

remembered one last thing he wanted to say. His last words

were not about the world of undying forms that he was about

to enter, but: “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you

remember to pay the debt?” Phaedo ends his narration:

“Such was the end, Echerates, of our friend; concerning

whom I may truly say, that of all men of his time whom I

have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.”8

Vladimir Kozhnikov, who was at Fedorov’s deathbed,

tells us that during his last, painful hours, Fedorov said

nothing of himself, or of his pain, or even of death itself,

but continued to talk as long as he had strength about the

contents of the last two articles he had written, and that

even after he could no longer speak, his lips continued to

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tremble as if he were trying to express the unuttered

thoughts that were still burning in his eyes. 9

And in his presentation of Fedorov’s thought published

shortly after Fedorov’s death, Kozhevnikov begins with

sentiments similar to Phaedo’s: “A wonderful, rare,

exceptional man has passed away. Those who knew him at all

do not have to be reminded of Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov’s

exalted mind, of his conscientiousness as a worker, and of

his ideal moral purity; without any prompting, they will

say: ‘he was a wise and righteous man;’ and those closer

to him will add: ‘he was one of the small number of saints

who hold the world together.’”10

So, in the end, we have two very special, even saintly

philosophers, who wrote about death from nearly opposite

perspectives, each with compelling force, but faced it with

similar tranquility and courage. Thus, despite Fedorov’s

vigorous and convincing rejection of Socrates’ (to me)

equally winning and convincing arguments, despite presenting

us with an irresolvable ideological incompatibility, an

existential, almost Kierkegaardian “Either/Or,”

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nevertheless in his manner of both living and dying, Fedorov

remains, paradoxically, “The Moscow Socrates.”

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NOTES

3 The Works of Plato, Jowett translation, Modern Library Edition, New York, 1956, p. 97.4 Henry David Thoreau, Chapter Eighteen, Walden, various editions, first published 1854.5 Xenophon presents a slightly different Socrates than Plato. In Xenophon’s The Memorabilia: Recollections of Socrates, Socrates in BookII, Part II, helps Lamprocles, a self-centered youth, discover that he needs to show more gratitude and respect for his parents, especiallyhis mother; and in several other of Xenophon’s dialogues Socrates guides various interlocutors to a fuller appreciation of the gods, tradition, and the existing laws of the state. 6 P. Chaadaev, “Third Letter,” in Edie, Scanlan, Zeldin, and Kline, Russian Philosophy, Vol. I, Chicago, 1965, p. 1298 Ibid, p. 189.9 Vladimir Kozhevnikov, Letter to A.K. Gorsky, reprinted in N.F. Fedorov: Pro et Contra I, St. Petersburg, 2004, p. 114.10 V.A. Kozhevnikov, “Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov: Opyt izlozheniia ego ucheniia po izdannym I neizdannym proizvedeniiam, perepidke I lichnym besedam,”, in N.F. Fedorov: Pro et Contra, I. p. 231