of the West, but also those of ancient India and China. He did not think it possible for himself to prefer any philosophical system he knew, and thus he remained a skeptic. He contended that the foremost task of a scientist, studying reality, is accomplished not by philosophy but by empirical science, by the specific facts it uncovers, and by empirical generalizations based on these facts.
Vernadsky, Moscow 1940
He considered the notion of an “empirical generalization” to belong to the highest category of scientific cognition, unlike scientific hypotheses and theories, which always turn out to be temporary. As a specific example of an empirical generalization of everlasting significance, he gave the Periodic Law of Chemical Elements discovered by Mendeleyev. To this we can now add his own empirical generalizations, such as the ideas of “living matter” and “scientific thought,” which need no proof. His teachings on the biosphere and the noösphere may probably also may be counted as such.
Vernadsky wrote a lot about the significance of science as a whole; scientific hypotheses and theories on the one hand, and of empirical generalizations on the other hand. He noted the lack of philosophical understanding concerning the issue of the place of empirical generalizations in contemporary cognition theory, and was the first to put forward this problem, which has not attracted the attention of philosophers up till now.
The volume of Vernadsky’s manuscripts on philosophical issues is large enough, but these papers were never published during the author’s life. He did not intend them for publication, since, it seems to me, he perfectly understood their discrepancy with the officially cultivated dialectic materialism, which had acquired the status of State Philosophy.
Vernadsky had always stressed the distinct difference between the cognitive potential of philosophy and that of the empirical sciences. But even in the very first manifestations of the ancient philosophical mind, he saw the dawn of scientific knowledge. He wrote in one of his letters of 1902:
I look at the meaning of philosophy in the development of knowledge in quite a different way than most naturalists, and attach to it great fruitful significance. I think these are aspects of one and the same process, aspects that are absolutely indispensable and inseparable. They can be separated only in our minds. If one of them decays, the other will stop growing too.”
And here are words from his 1902 lecture, “On a Scientific Worldview”:
Never in history have we observed science without philosophy, and studying the history of scientific thought, we see that throughout all the time of its existence, philosophical concepts and philosophical ideas have permeated science as an indispensable element.
This is an example of his own philosophical reflections from his student’s diary of 1885:
What is time and space? These are problems that throughout the ages have interested the human mind in the form of its most brilliant representatives…. No doubt, time and space do not exist in nature separately; they are inseparable. We know not a single phenomenon that covers no time and no space. Only for logical convenience do we imagine time and space separately, only because our mind is used to doing so while solving problems.
In reality we see time and space separately only in our imagination. To what do these inseparable parts belong? They belong to the only thing existing, to matter, which we divide into two basic coordinates: time and space.
These words were written more than a quarter of a century before Professor Minkovsky, at the Mathematical Congress in Cologne in 1908, overwhelmed listeners by his new ideas about the single, indivisible concept of space-time, about time as the fourth dimension of space. Such was the force of Vernadsky’s anticipating thought in a field that was not even his specialty.
Vernadsky in his office, Moscow 1940
He always tried to understand Newton’s abstract geometrical and mathematical space through real parts of physical space covered by natural bodies, including living organisms that not only “cover the space” but also form its characteristics in the space they cover. This is a way of understanding Vernadsky’s thoughts about the difference between the space of natural sciences and the space of philosophy and mathematics. A large section of his “Philosophical Thoughts of a Naturalist,” entitled “Time and Space in Living and Inert Matter,” is devoted to this problem.
His ideas of the space of living organisms were drawn from L. Pasteur’s discovery of spatial difference and dissymmetry in organic molecules – which, as it turned out later, manifests itself also in macrophenomena, such as the direction of convolutions of spiral shells of mollusks, the spirality of some tree trunks and climbing plants, right- and left-handedness of man, different functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and so forth.
From separate empirical facts, Vernadsky draws the conclusion about a specific state of the real physical space of living organisms. He sees this specific state in the asymmetry of processes and structures on the territory occupied and controlled by organisms. Thus he posed the philosophical problem of the real characteristics of space (unlike the abstract space of geometry), separate parts of which are controlled by living organisms with their selective asymmetrical behavior, unlike the non-living nature around them in which symmetry dominates.
Vernadsky’s treatment of the problem of the real meaning of time within biological systems is also complex. On the basis of the notion of the specific structure of physical space, part of which is at the disposal of every organism, it could be possible to think about some specific state of time within this unity of “space-time” or “biological time,” as Vernadsky called it. This is the so-called “proper time” of living organisms, which is related to their nature and to their own biological cycles, which are distinctly different in length. This time has nothing to do with the movement of celestial bodies or with the laws of the atomic nucleus decomposition on which the present-day definition of absolute time is based. This problem stated by Vernadsky has not been worked out either by natural science or by philosophy.
Alexander Yanshin,
Academician, Co-Founder,
International V. I. Vernadsky Foundation,
V. P. Emeritus of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
Vernadsky at Borovoy 1942
essays on geochemistry
the history of geochemistry
1 geochemistry as a science of the twentieth century
We are living at a turning point in a remarkable era of human history. Events of extreme importance and profundity are taking place in the realm of human thought. Our fundamental views of “the Universe,” “Nature,” or “the Whole,” so much spoken about in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, are changing before our eyes with incredible speed. Not only theories and scientific hypotheses, those ephemeral products of intellect, but also new exact empirical facts and generalizations of exclusive value make us rebuild and reconstruct the picture of nature that has remained untouched and almost unchanged by many generations of scientists and thinkers.
The
