Man and His Environment: from the Earth to Outer Space

Just as any other living creature, man has an environment of his own, which affects in various ways, the interaction of all the constituent elements within him. Recently the sciences of man have come to realize more and more the influence of the environment on the state of the or­ganism and the psyche, an influence which determines the feeling of comfort or discomfort) A philosophical view of man would there­fore be essentially incomplete without a consideration of the man-environment system. Social environment will be discussed later, and now we shall focus our attention on what is known as the natural en­vironment.

Our life depends on natural phenomena to a much greater extent than we are inclined to believe. We live on a planet in whose depths countless turbulent processes occur of which we have no idea but which affect us all; the planet itself is hurtling through space as a grain of sand. Most effects of natural phenomena on the human or­ganism are still unknown — science has studied only an infinitesimal part of these effects. Thus we know that if a human being is placed into a non-magnetic medium, death will be instantaneous.

Man exists in the system of interaction of all the natural forces, and is subject to extremely varied actions from these forces. Mental equilibrium is only possible under physiological and psychological adaptation to the natural world, and since man is above all a social being, he can only adapt himself to nature through society.) The so­cial organism acts within the framework of nature, and if "this is for­gotten, the punishment is ruthless. If a community's values are not oriented towards harmony with nature but rather at isolation of man from nature under the sign of a monstrously overblown urbanism, man becomes, sooner or later, a victim of such axiological orienta­tions. Besides, a kind of environmental vacuum or lack of room for activity arises in this case, and no social conditions can compensate him for the psychological losses due to alienation from nature. Man is a biological as well as social being, and just as he will die without the society of other people, so he can die without communion with nature. Both the social and natural forces act in this sense absolute­ly ruthlessly.

The concept of environment is not restricted to the sphere of the Earth —it includes the cosmos as a whole. The Earth is not a cosmic body isolated from the universe. It seems to be firmly established in modern science that life on earth sprang into being due to cosmic processes. It is therefore quite natural that all living organisms in­teract in one way or another with the cosmos. It has been discovered that sun storms and the electromagnetic disturbances connected with them affect the organism's cells, its nervous and vascular sys­tems, man's sense of well-being and the psyche. We live in unison with the entire cosmic environment, and any changes in it affect our well-being.

Intense work is now being done on the problem of links between living organisms and the energy-information interactions in the universe. The ideas of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Vladimir Vernadsky and Alexander Chizhevsky on this subject appear to be quite topical and perspicacious; they insisted that we are surrounded on all sides by flows of cosmic energy reaching us across the vast distances from the stars, the planets and the sun, and that the processes occurring in the infinite spaces of the universe affect in one way or another all organic and inorganic matter on earth.

Outstanding scientist, anthropologist and philosopher Teiyard de Chardin considers anthroposociogenesis as a constituent part of cosmogenesis as a whole, driven by the interaction of mechanical and mental energies. Mental accumulations, growth of states of its expression is a factor of man’ origin. Man realizes his consciousness, and that makes his existing in the world a new form of being, raises the process of evolution to a new level. Teiyard de Chardin, A.L. Chizhevsky, V.I. Vernadskyi ideas formed the basis of the cosmic origin of man conception. The emergence of man and, consequently, a social form of matter was not an accident, but the general tendency of cosmic evolution. In modern cosmology and physics there is an "anthropic principle", meaning that in the foundation of our Metagalaxy a tendency towards the emergence of intelligent beings was laid. Basic constants and fundamental parameters of the physical world are such that physical, chemical and biological conditions for the emergence of reasonable beings in the universe were necessarily created. Man acts as a natural-cosmic creature, which contains the infinity of space. Vernadskyi introduced the term of noosphere to designate the sphere of rational life on the planet, man's natural environment and its formative impact on him. The combination of two elements — the biological and the social, life and reason—is the basis for a broader conception of the term "envi­ronment". The noosphere need not be regarded as a purely terre­strial phenomenon, it may be extended to embrace the entire cos­mos. Life and reason apparently exist in other worlds as well, and man as a particle of the noosphere is thus a social-planetary-cosmic being.

Since the environment makes such a decisive impact on man, its concept must be subjected to careful analysis, with due attention to its cosmic, natural, and social components.

Поиск по сайту: