Almost any educated person, no matter in what sphere of social activity he made his efforts, heard the word “noosphere”, sounding somewhat mysteriously. It is considered a special novelty of the 20th century, such as the theory of evolution was in the previous century. Let us try once again to understand this semi-mysterious idea, which seems to be the doctrine of the biosphere and noosphere, so closely connected with the name and scientific and philosophical heritage of Vernadsky.
Firstly, the year of its birth and its immediate author is precisely known.
As early as 1875, the term “biosphere” was first coined by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess. But he did not define the concept, did not designate its scientific objectivity, therefore for a long time the word "biosphere" was used in a variety of meanings.
For the first time, this category was used as a science in the walls of the College de France, the famous Parisian educational institution famous for its highly intellectual level of teaching, at lectures in 1927. The author of the term was the philosopher and mathematician Eduard Leroy. It is interesting to note that the like-minded Leroy - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was recognized as a co-author of the noosphere concept. But these two scientists directly refer their listeners and readers to the biospheric representations of the Russian scientist V. Vernadsky, who gave his lectures at the Sorbonne.
Vladimir Ivanovich, formulating the doctrine of the biosphere, continued his thoughts on the basis of the biogeochemical approach to it. Since the 30s of the twentieth century, the whole energy of the scientist’s optimistic worldview has been drawn to the noospheric idea.
But let's return for a while to the origins, to Leroy and Teilhard de Chardin. What was the essence of their ideas? The emergence of the human species in a series of ascending forms means, in their opinion, that evolution passes to the use of other means, exclusively of a psychic nature. Scientists claimed that evolution has created in the human face a fundamentally new means of its own development - a special spiritual and psychic ability, one that previously did not exist in nature at all. Chardin himself determined the distinctive properties of this phenomenon - man: the presence of reflective mind, self-awareness and the ability, therefore, to know himself, then to creatively reproduce all forms of being.
In a later work, "The Place of Man in Nature," he examined the issue of origin and life, and its essence, putting man in the general series of the cosmic process of the complication of matter.
Interestingly, the young Vladimir Ivanovich, while still a university student, wrote down a wonderful idea in his diary, which leads the doctrine of the biosphere to a philosophical situation. In particular, he argued that the history of the Earth in planetary consideration can be represented as the history of a change in matter. Moreover, all these changes do not occur spontaneously and randomly, but on the basis of a very clear pattern of the universal level.
In this statement, the author of the doctrine of the biosphere leads to the idea that where matter seems to us to be “dead”, it is actually not dead, but only “life-long”, life in it is present as a potentiality. Vernadsky calls this phenomenon hominization, a peculiar leap of planetary development at the cosmic level, as the revitalization (vitalization) of matter. In a word, the doctrine of the biosphere considers the appearance of man, no more and no less, as a fact of further, qualitatively new development of the biosphere itself, and after it the entire cosmic process. Associated in this way with the evolutionary sequence of life, man, however, is the original whole. On the basis of this thesis, the creators and adherents of the doctrine of the noosphere tend to consider a person not a separate representative of a biological species, and not a “crown” of nature, but only a representative of the order of a new reality, which, in relation to the biosphere, acts as an independent new “sphere”.
Homization is the way in which this new sphere develops, gradually rising above the animal biosphere.
The human sphere located behind it in time is characterized by the properties of reflection, the individual’s ability to make free and conscious choice and creativity. This is the sphere of the mind - the noosphere. That is, in this movement of V. Vernadsky’s thought we see a desire to present the doctrine of the biosphere as a theory of a preliminary study of a higher order phenomenon - the theory of the noosphere.