Scientific ideas about living matter, Vernadsky’s doctrine of the biosphere and noosphere, are rooted in a philosophical concept, with the help of which many thinkers tried to comprehend the phenomenon of Life and the place of man in it, as its most significant generation. Starting with Darwin, these evolutionary ideas became the impetus for a significant reorientation of thinking. On the one hand, man has finally become involved in a family-related series of development that goes to the simplest life forms, on the other hand, unprecedented horizons began to open up to him in the bold perspective of the evolutionary dream.
Vernadsky himself once noted that the search for cosmic connection lies precisely in increasing the importance of these ideas for the philosophy of his time, which was manifested in the works of thinkers such as Bergson and N.F. Fedorov.
The contact of the founder of biogeochemistry with the thought of the French philosopher Henri Bergson is exactly the case that Vernadsky wrote about, pointing out the importance of philosophical thought for scientific research. Without ever becoming a prisoner of the metaphysical or idealistic framework of the system, the scientist found in it valuable sources of the future development of science.
In “Creative Evolution,” Bergson developed the idea that life, as such, is a component of being, and its unfolding is a process of cosmic property, driven by internal forces. These ideas were very close to the Russian scientist and it was on them that Vernadsky's theory of the biosphere began to form. It was Bergson who was the first in science to pose the problem of distinguishing physical time from “living” time on a scientific basis, which was especially noted by Vernadsky.
Vernadsky fundamentally rejected the old biological method of research, which was based on a research determinant, because, in his opinion, if such an approach recognized the influence of the environment on living matter, he could not answer the question about the nature of the formation of this environment itself.
The rational activity of people in the Vernadsky dimension becomes a place of accumulation of energy of creative thought, actively transforming nature. Vernadsky emphasized that his idea is not new, the utopian approach to it is found in the teachings of Karl Kessler and P.A. Kropotkin, and then in the ideas of Fedorov, who came closest to comprehending such a substance as the biosphere.
However, the decisive precondition for the creation of the concept of the noosphere by scientists is the need to recognize the unity of mankind. As Vernadsky wrote, the biosphere in the usual sense does not yet find a moral interpretation among people. At the same time, the idea of the unity of mankind, equality and fraternity, acts precisely as the moral foundation, on the one hand, and on the other, as the motive that makes scientists look at the world around us and the cosmos in a completely different way, as being the product of one principle.
The third principle, which is incorporated in Vernadsky’s doctrine of the biosphere and which leads to the development of this scientific direction, is the “massification” of social, historical life. And, finally, what has become an objective condition for the popularization of the doctrine of the noosphere is the natural growth of science, its transformation into the main force of this very noosphere.
Vernadsky introduced into the consideration of scientific knowledge a completely special category - the noosphere, which he defined as scientific thought, which is a product of the evolution of living matter, and the process of this evolution cannot be stopped. According to Vernadsky, the potential of such development is practically unlimited, and therefore scientific thought becomes the moral determinant of human development, which goes along the path of awareness of its "universality", that is, along the path of encompassing the entire biosphere and all of humanity.
Interestingly, such thoughts came to Vernadsky’s doctrine of the biosphere on the eve of World War II, which allowed the scientist to convincingly prove the postulate that scientific knowledge, as a force creating the noosphere, can also serve dark forces that are antinospheric in nature. The humanistic crisis of the mid-twentieth century, according to V.I. Vernadsky, forced to take a fresh look at the questions of being and the connection of thought and the environment.
Only the idea of the noosphere, in its moral purity, can lead a person onto the path of development envisioned by him by the Cosmos. This idea forms the pivot on which the universalism of such an extraordinary phenomenon is substantiated as Vernadsky’s doctrine of the biosphere is. Only the presence of active evolutionary thought, in his opinion, which began to form recently, in the nineteenth century, gives a person a different vector of understanding himself in nature - understanding himself as a creature consciously creative, actively “growing”, whose purpose is not only and not as much in the transformation of nature as in the transformation of nature of its own.