The Common Task

Fedorov

History finds a way to return to an idea and one might find in Fedorov some roots for the Transhumanist. Obviously the Singularity is the virtual resurrection of the dead. Federov had other ideas.

Using science, art, and technology, Fedorov believed that humanity’s primary goal should be to create the Kingdom of Heaven. He, unlike most Christians who equate this concept with the movement of the disembodied soul to the afterlife, saw the acceptance of death as false Christianity and believed that it was every human being’s duty to work towards abolishing death. “Death is merely the result or manifestation of our infantilism [...]” he wrote in The Philosophy of the Common Task. “People are still minors, half-beings whereas the fullness of personal existence, personal perfection is possible.”

On top of being a daring religious philosopher, Fedorov was also an avid and highly capable student of the sciences. His propositions for a death cure were shockingly prescient, though they seemed outlandish during his lifetime. To fix what he believed was the innate “flaw” of decay, Fedorov proposed replacing human body parts with artificial organs when needed. Today, the practice of using artificial organs, including hearts, eyes, lungs, livers, and more, is fairly commonplace and an area of intense focus for contemporary Transhumanists, who support life extension via machine augmentation. In fact, theorists such as Ray Kurzweil, author of 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, propose replacing the entire body with a technological host by uploading the brain to a computer.

For Fedorov, the quest for immortality required all of humanity to unite against the universal enemy of death. He was convinced that immortality would act as a panacea for all of humanity’s greatest struggles, including war, poverty, and disease.

We post-moderns go in a slightly different direction with our ideas but the kinship is clearly there with the bizzare Gnosticism of physical resurrection. Already science seeks to bring dead Mammoths to life.

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