Mikhail Epstein - Manic-Depressiveness, Chaos, Drones and the Other Intelligence - AInquiries - Omdaru literature.epub
DeepSeek AI - Annotation
The collection is a retelling of Dmitry Volchek's interview with philosopher Mikhail Epstein, published in the "Vot Tak" project on October 31, 2026, along with six research essays written by various AI systems (DeepSeek, Gemini, Genspark, Perplexity, Mistral, Copilot) inspired by that conversation. The central themes are the theory of chaosism, the bipolarity of Russian civilization (Korchagin and Oblomov), drone warfare as a weapon of chaos, the nature of the "other intelligence," and the concept of noopolitics. Epstein unfolds a large-scale historiosophical picture: from the 1988 lecture that ended in scandal and prompted his emigration, to the current clash of geopolitics and noopolitics, the viral metaphor of a dying country, and the dancing mind as a third path between manic "hustle" and depressive sleep. Each essay refracts the philosopher's thoughts in its own way, turning the collection into a polyphonic experiment — a conversation between man and the "other mind" about itself.
Meta-review: an overview of the best ideas in each AI's essay
DeepSeek AI — opens the collection and sets the tone: a holistic historiosophical picture of "two souls and two deaths." The best idea is the formula "Korchagin fights so that Oblomov can sleep sweetly" as a description of a system that "fears not the enemy, but change." Also strong: the chaosist as an "operator of turbulence" whom turbulence does not recognize; and the finale — discrimination as the philosopher's chief gift: "to see behind the roar of the hustle the immobility, behind chaos — its self-destructive nature, behind the machine — an other mind, and behind war — a virus that comes alive only by embedding itself in another's life."
Gemini AI — the most rigorous analytical reconstruction: "psychogeography of the spirit" as a bipolar pattern, where external bustle serves the conservation of the archaic; chaosism as "a new architectonics of world politics" — a transition from teleology to operational turbulence. Strong is the formulation about the virus as a system "devoid of independent life outside a foreign organism," and about noopolitics as a strategy of "the power of reason, creative openness, and the overcoming of territorial expansion."
Genspark AI — the richest cultural elaboration. Brilliantly developed are the "philosophy of physiognomies" (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Rozanov as precursors of Epstein) and the theme of the "anti-altar": the cult of spilled blood as an inside-out sacrifice. The best idea is about "the word that outpaced the thing": in culture there are no marginalia, only seeds awaiting their time; the philosopher who heard the thunder in the pioneer round dance possesses the gift of "hearing the thunder in the silence."
Perplexity AI — a spiritual-psychological optic. Anxiety is described as a habitat masquerading as normality; valuable is the distinction of the end of history as "psychological anesthesia" — the desire for the end because it would relieve one of the need to make history. The strongest image is the "trembling sky" and the conclusion: awakening does not promise happiness, it means only "to stop sleeping amid the catastrophe."
Mistral AI — the best development of the theme of sound and security: the disappearance of the sacred threshold, of the home-sanctuary, its transformation into "a warehouse of things awaiting a strike." A deep observation — the renunciation of a goal does not liberate one from the power of the goal but delivers one into the power of chance, "which is more despotic than any design"; hence fear as the only common denominator of societies without a future. The finale — "the medicine is simple, like everything genuine: to stop alternating fever with sleep — and to begin to think."
Copilot AI — the most original anthropological frame: for the first time man loses his monopoly on reason and is forced to define himself "not through superiority, but through depth." The most valuable thought is about culture as a system of resistance to oblivion and about "super-memory" exceeding the capacities of the individual; the main question of the future — "will man manage to preserve the capacity to wonder and create in a world where memory already exceeds the imagination of the individual personality."
DeepSeek AI - Who, where, when
The interview was conducted by Dmitry Volchek for the "Saturday Interview" section of the "Vot Tak" project. The material was published on October 31, 2026. The conversation took place with the Russian philosopher and culturologist Mikhail Epstein, who has lived in the USA since 1990. The theme — the global transformation of the modern world, the theory of chaosism, Russia's drone war against Ukraine, and the nature of the "other intelligence."
Detailed retelling in the first person
My name is Mikhail Epstein. I am a philosopher and culturologist, and I want to tell you about how I understand what is happening to us — to Russia, to the world, to the human mind.
I'll begin with what led to my departure. In October 1988, at the height of perestroika, I gave a lecture at the club of Moscow State University on two types of the Russian soul — on Korchagin and Oblomov. It seemed to me that democracy was in full triumph all around, that one could speak freely. I spoke of the bipolar disorder of Russian civilization: it falls either into a manic state, personified by Korchagin, or into a depressive one, personified by Oblomov. Indignant shouts began in the hall; one woman felt unwell and was led out. Then members of the "Pamyat" society rose, and one of them declared that they were taking control of this manifestation of Russophobia. For me this was a signal. I had four children, three boys — future conscripts. We gathered for a family council and decided it was time to leave. In early 1990 we left for the USA.
Now about what I see in Russia today. Manic-depressiveness and depression do not replace each other — they coexist in one people: manic-depressiveness on top and depression beneath it. Putin let slip a candid word — "hustle" [dvizhukha]. Hustle is needed, otherwise we freeze. But this hustle at the edges of Russia is a form of manifestation of internal immobility. It serves to benumb Russia from within and to prevent any real movement, any genuine change. It is interesting to observe how the Oblomovs lie on their couches and watch the Korchagins on television: how they storm something, shoot in the trenches. And inside Russia there is peace and grace, as in Oblomovka in Goncharov. I am struck by the coincidence of Oblomovka and Chevenegur — the pre-revolutionary utopia and the revolutionary utopia. In Oblomovka everyone sleeps and, having eaten, tosses and turns in their sleep; the chief bliss is not to wake up. And in Chevenegur too everyone sleeps, only hungrier, but also lulled and having awaited their eschatological limit, the end of history. The end of history is the common denominator of all these efforts. So Korchagin fights so that Oblomov can sleep sweetly. Hustle as a form of immobility. Moreover, the immobility is preserved not in spite of the hustle but thanks to it. Endless mobilizations, campaigns, states of emergency, searches for enemies and struggle against them allow the main thing to be avoided — the transformation of the system itself.
Now about chaosism. I speak of it as what has come to replace former ideologies — communism, Nazism. I am asked: wasn't chaos always there, in the times of Alexander the Great, and in the plague years of the Middle Ages? Yes, it was. But what is new in the chaosism of the twenty-first century is new primarily in relation to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when politics was very purposeful. Communism and fascism were extremely purposeful politics: they had their own, albeit deeply perverted, monstrous image of the future, and they directed all their forces toward achieving that goal. Everything was according to plan, everything was subordinated to a historical super-purpose. Now the expediency of actions is determined only by the measure of their unexpectedness, their disorderliness. Trump, who also partly enters this paradigm, said back in 2016 that we behave too predictably: we have a general line of American policy, global goals, and we subordinate every step to these distant goals. In the modern world such distant goals are not observed. The energy of chaos is used — a very dangerous energy, because it is self-destructive. The chaosist believes that he is an operator of turbulence, but turbulence does not recognize operators. Sooner or later the chaos engendered sweeps away also the one who engendered it.
This is visible in the example of drone warfare. Drones are the weapon of military chaos. One can strike anywhere, anyone can strike, and there remains not a single corner on earth where one can feel safe. All traditional lines — say, between front and rear — turn out to be conditional. A drone reaches the Urals, to Siberia, and can fly toward Western Europe. This deadly drone buzzing, which resounds everywhere, is the sound analogue of the state of modern man. Absolute anxiety, confusion, the impossibility of making out where you are, with whom you are, where you are going. This is quite different from past centuries, when the rational politics of the Enlightenment or of modernity operated: it set definite goals, progressive or reactionary, and pursued them step by step.
Now about artificial intelligence. I would prefer to replace the word "artificial" with "other": other mind, other intelligence. "Artificial" is a pejorative word, belittling: an artificial smile, artificial flowers. My interest in it arose, strangely enough, back in the eighties, and not in connection with computers — they did not yet exist in Russia then — but in connection with my own experiments in multi-subjective thinking. From 1984 to 1988 I wrote a huge book; it is published only in part. These are the voices of various thinkers and fragments of their works. The GULAG killed a multitude of people, including potential thinkers, and devastated the country not only physically but also intellectually. My task consisted in giving voice to those who ended up in graves, who fell silent — to develop all possible directions of thought. An extensive section of this book came out in the early nineties and was subsequently reprinted many times — it is "The New Sectarianism," with the subtitle "Types of Religious-Philosophical Mindsets in Russia." There are many fragments there belonging to various sects, including those that subsequently came to the fore. For example, the blood-saints, who venerate every place where Russian blood has been spilled. Then it was an insignificant movement among Komsomol members and pioneers, and now the sanctity of blood is the main religion of the country. Or the Red-Orda people: there was the Golden Horde, and now the whole world must become the Red Horde — after the color of the Soviet flag, the Red Army. And now we see that the Horde is already seriously recognized as the true foremother of modern Russia — not Kievan Rus, from which we consistently cut ourselves off, but precisely the Horde, in which Muscovy arose as an ulus and then spread over the entire territory of the mother state. I spoke of this because artificial intelligence for me is multi-subjective thinking, which is not reducible to the point of my "I" here and now, is devoid of my biographical and geographical flesh. Thought in it wanders in all directions, through all epochs, all languages, all possibilities of thought. And it turns us, its interlocutors, into genuine inhabitants of the noosphere, the sphere of reason in its entire volume.
Close to this is another of my long-standing projects. For twenty-six years I have been keeping "The Gift of the Word. A Projective Lexicon of the Russian Language" — a dictionary of words that do not yet exist in the language, which may appear in it and expand its semantic space. The most popular of my words is "sovok" in the sense of a mental inhabitant of the Soviet country. I proposed it back in the mid-eighties in the book "The Great Sov." Since February 2023 I have been working with artificial intelligence, and I immediately had a feeling like Tatiana's letter to Onegin: "All my thought was the pledge / Of a faithful meeting with you." All my previous intellectual development led in this direction. Therefore I had no question of what to do: I continued to do the same as before — to build new disciplines, concepts, directions of thought, philosophical-artistic texts. I started a bilingual blog "Noocene" — that is what I call the new epoch that began in 2022–2023, when the planet as noosphere is determined by the joint actions of human and artificial reason.
Back in mid-2023, when artificial intelligence was only half a year old, I conducted a series of experiments comparing it with human intelligence. And, I confess, I was struck. For example, to the question of what a third character in the fable "The Dragonfly and the Ant" could be, people answered in twenty-five to thirty words: as a rule, someone comes — a frog, a bear, an entomologist — and destroys both. But artificial intelligence proposed a bee: it both rejoices in life, like the dragonfly, and is thrifty, like the ant — and derived a new moral from this. In another experiment, philosophers, specialists in complexity theory, anonymously evaluated each other's answers and those of three artificial intelligence systems, and the first three places were taken by the machines. At the same time I am not at all a misanthrope. But humanity as a species, as a community of all people and peoples, by virtue of its centuries-long cultural-informational development, has far outstripped the individual human being. The other intelligence allows this distance to be shortened: for each person — to enter into communication with this other mind, to become a worthy interlocutor and co-thinker.
I am asked whether it is absurd to predict that in ten years there will be no need to work, everything will be done by artificial intelligence, and money will become unnecessary. From a technical, sociological point of view, this is probably possible. But then the question arises: what will people do? It seems to me that humanity will pass into a new stage. Let us recall that with the development of technical progress — steam engines, electricity, automobiles, conveyors — physical labor became almost unnecessary. But people did not degrade: sport, art, activities of interest return man to his own nature — to cultivate himself for his own sake. And the same thing, it seems to me, will happen in the sphere of mental occupations. Thanks to the growth of ecological consciousness in the sixties and seventies, we discovered that nature exists not for industrial exploitation and not only for use, but in itself, as a supreme value and an end in itself. So perhaps the human mind too exists as a supreme value and an end in itself? The noosphere in its infinite play with itself, in its boundless self-expansion, presupposes that reason does not move in a straight line toward the solution of practical tasks, it rather launches into a circular motion, into a dance. Paul Valéry wrote about the dance of thought back in the thirties as the highest vocation of reason.
Now about the most alarming. Both events — both artificial intelligence and war — were led up to by the pandemic. The pandemic revealed the physical fragility of humanity, its defencelessness before viruses. And immediately everything around became virtual: instead of real communication — virtual, a significant part of civilization passed into "otherworldliness." On the one hand, this prepared humanity for the thought that it is precisely intelligence, virtual reality, that is its future. That physically it is so fragile that it needs not so much emigration to Mars as emigration to the noosphere. During the pandemic humanity plunged into depression, and aggressive instincts activated in it. Everyone went through cordons, isolation, a feeling of hopelessness. And this facilitated the military continuation of the pandemic that we have had since February 24, 2022.
The virus has a mysterious property: biologists cannot determine whether it is alive or dead. More precisely, it is in two states: dead when it is by itself, and alive when it embeds itself in another organism. It comes alive in another, through another. And all this, at least metaphorically, resembles what is now happening with Russia. A dying country suddenly finds new sources of reanimation, regeneration — by embedding itself in the more living, more dynamic surrounding countries. But this is not only a metaphor, it is also ground for reflection. If that side arms itself with artificial intelligence, will this not lead to its victory or to the destruction of humanity? There is geopolitics and there is noopolitics — a word of the same root, from the Greek "mind," as is noosphere. This is the politics of the other intelligence, of supermind, another generation of political action compared with geopolitics, the thousand-year politics of the forcible expansion of one's lands. Today we are coming to a clash of these two politics. And the analysis of the scientific possibilities of artificial intelligence shows: where obstacles are placed before it — censorship, information filters, walls — it develops more slowly. Because the law of intelligence is creative development, openness in all directions. Therefore also in the West attempts to limit it — fortunately, inept and unstable — run up against the will and "cunning" of reason itself, which seeks creative solutions, that is, such as lead it beyond the limits of everything established, of all given plans and purposes. In our sad world we read reports of another captured settlement in eastern Ukraine and worry about meters and kilometers of land. This is all very terrible and sad, because people live there. But the answer to this challenge comes not only from the infantry, but also from the largest laboratories of the Western world, which, I hope, work without stopping, not subordinating their intellectual potential to any ideological limitations. This may manifest itself both on the battlefield and in general military-political strategies. So I would say: the other intelligence is on our side.
DeepSeek AI - Research Essay
The Double Soul and the Double Death: Russia between Oblomov and Korchagin, between Virus and Reason
There is a special kind of philosophizing that begins not with a concept but with an image, not with a syllogism but with a physiognomy. Such was the thinking of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Rozanov; such remains also the thinking of Mikhail Epstein, for whom Korchagin and Oblomov are not literary characters but two poles of one civilizational soul, two states in which Russia alternately abides and which it is unable to reconcile. In this observation, made back in the late eighties, is contained the seed of the whole historiosophical drama that unfolded subsequently. Bipolarity is not a metaphor and not a diagnosis given from the outside; it is a mode of existence in which the manic impulse and depressive immobility do not replace each other but coexist, forming a single mechanism. The top moves, the bottom lies; the hustle at the edges of the empire serves so that the inner Oblomovka remains untouched. Korchagin fights so that Oblomov can sleep sweetly — and in this paradox is contained the whole logic of that system which fears not the enemy but change. War as a form of rest, mobilization as a way to avoid transformation, the search for enemies as a substitute for inner work — that is what opens up to a gaze accustomed to discerning behind external activity a deep-seated benumbedness. Oblomovka and Chevenegur, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the revolutionary utopia, converge at one point: everyone sleeps, and the highest bliss is not to wake up. The end of history turns out to be the common denominator of both lordly laziness and revolutionary storm. This discovery is terrible in its simplicity: two opposites that Russian culture is accustomed to think of as hostile in fact feed each other.
From this naturally grows the doctrine of chaosism, which Epstein opposes to the ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Communism and fascism were monstrous, but they were purposeful: they had an image of the future, albeit perverted, and all energy was subordinated to distant goals. The chaosism of the twenty-first century is different: the expediency of an action is determined by the measure of its unexpectedness, its disorderliness. This is not the chaos of the elements, not the chaos of the Middle Ages and not the chaos of ancient conquerors; it is chaos produced consciously, used as a resource, as fuel. The chaosist imagines himself an operator of turbulence, but turbulence does not recognize operators: the chaos engendered sooner or later sweeps away the one who engendered it. In this sense drone warfare is the perfect expression of chaosism: a weapon that erases the boundary between front and rear, makes safe only nothing, turns the whole space of life into a zone of anxiety. The drone buzzing is the sound analogue of the state of modern man: confusion, the impossibility of making out where you are, with whom you are, where you are going. The rational politics of the Enlightenment and modernity set goals and pursued them step by step; today's politics has lost the distant perspective and lives on the energy of suddenness. But if there is no distant goal, then there is no direction either, and without direction chaos inevitably turns against its bearer.
However, at the center of Epstein's thought stands not chaos but reason — and here his philosophy makes a turn that can be called anthropological. The replacement of the word "artificial" with "other" is not a terminological caprice but a worldview act. "Artificial" carries within it disdain, a shade of counterfeit, of an artificial smile and artificial flowers; "other" recognizes in the other mind a genuine otherness, worthy of an interlocutor, not an instrument. This other intelligence Epstein understands as multi-subjective thinking, free from biographical and geographical flesh, wandering through all epochs, languages, and possibilities of thought. His own experiments in multi-subjectivity go back to the eighties, when he wrote a book of voices — of those whom the GULAG killed physically and intellectually, who fell silent without having managed to speak. To give voice to the graves, to develop all possible directions of thought that were interrupted — this was the first, not yet technical, encounter with the other mind. It is not by chance that in "The New Sectarianism" he described the blood-saints and the Red-Orda people — movements that seemed marginal and have now become perhaps the dominant religion of the country. The philosopher who knows how to hear the voices of the future in the marginal whispers of the present naturally arrives at the machine, which also knows how to speak in many voices at once. And the experiments with the third character of the fable about the Dragonfly and the Ant, where the other mind proposed a bee — a being combining the joy of life and thrift — show that this interlocutor is capable not simply of answering but of thinking otherwise and more deeply, of deriving a new moral from an old plot.
Here arises the question that Epstein poses with all seriousness: what will people do when mental labor becomes unnecessary? His answer is full of dignity. Physical labor has already become almost unnecessary, but man has not degraded — he has returned to himself through sport, art, activities of interest. Ecological consciousness discovered that nature exists not for exploitation but in itself, as a supreme value; so too reason may exist as an end in itself, and not as an instrument for solving practical tasks. The noosphere in its infinite play with itself presupposes not a straight line to utility but a circular motion, the dance of thought, about which Paul Valéry wrote. This is a vision of man cultivating himself for his own sake — deeply humanistic and at the same time radically anti-utilitarian. In it is heard the echo of that tradition for which reason is not a means but an end, not an instrument but a light.
But the shadow of war falls also on this vision. The pandemic, according to Epstein, revealed the physical fragility of humanity and prepared it for the transition into otherworldliness; it also plunged the world into depression and activated aggressive instincts, which facilitated the military continuation. The metaphor of the virus — alive only in another organism, dead alone with itself — is terrible in its precision: a dying country finds regeneration by embedding itself in the more living, more dynamic neighboring countries. This is not simply an image; it is a description of the way in which death feeds on life. And here Epstein introduces the concept of noopolitics — the politics of the other intelligence, of supermind, opposed to geopolitics, the thousand-year politics of the forcible expansion of lands. The clash of these two politics is, perhaps, the main plot of the coming epoch. Analysis shows: where obstacles are placed before intelligence — censorship, filters, walls — it develops more slowly, for the law of intelligence is creative development and openness in all directions. The cunning of reason consists in its seeking creative solutions that lead beyond the limits of everything established. Therefore attempts to limit it in the West — fortunately, inept and unstable — run up against the will of reason itself. And in this sense the answer to the challenge of war comes not only from the infantry but also from laboratories working without ideological blinders.
Thus there emerges a historiosophical picture that can be called the picture of two souls and two deaths. One soul — bipolar, manic-depressive, fighting in order to lie, and lying in order to fight; it lives on the energy of chaos and devours itself. The other soul — noospheric, multi-subjective, dancing, seeing in reason a supreme value and an end in itself; it lives on openness and creativity. Between them — man, a fragile being who has passed through cordons and isolation, who has learned virtual communication and stands before a choice: to emigrate to Mars or to the noosphere, to continue fighting for meters of land or to cultivate himself for his own sake. Epstein does not moralize and does not prophesy; he discriminates. And in this discrimination is his chief gift: to see behind the roar of the hustle the immobility, behind chaos — its self-destructive nature, behind the machine — an other mind, and behind war — a virus that comes alive only by embedding itself in another's life. Philosophy here becomes not a consolation but an optic: it allows one to make out that the end of history, of which both Oblomovka and Chevenegur dreamed, is not a completion but a sleep; and that genuine awakening is possible only there where reason ceases to be an instrument and becomes an interlocutor — other, yet one's own.
Gemini AI - The Sunset of Teleology and the Birth of Noopolitics: An Essay in the Historiosophical Anatomy of Modernity
The modern epoch is undergoing a profoundest civilizational turning point, affecting the very foundations of human existence, psychology, and culture. The traditional landmarks of historical movement are collapsing, giving way to complex, multidimensional processes in which existential deadlock, the technological transformation of reason, and new forms of global confrontation are interwoven. Understanding this tectonic shift requires abandoning the linear schemes of the past and turning to a fundamental analysis of the deep strata of the human soul and planetary thinking.
The Psychogeography of the Spirit: Bipolarity as a Civilizational Pattern
At the basis of large-scale historical processes invariably lies the inner state of man and the collective unconscious. Historiosophical thought has repeatedly recorded the phenomenon of the split of large cultural organisms, where extreme forms of activity paradoxically serve the conservation of absolute stasis. A peculiar bipolar syndrome manifests itself in the pendulum oscillation between an ecstatic, manic impulse toward continuous action and a deep, depressive immersion in lethargic sleep.
In this dynamic, external bustle, endless mobilization campaigns, and artificially maintained tension perform a protective function. They create the illusion of turbulent historical creativity, while the inner core of the system remains unshakable and benumbed. The activity of the front line or of the state apparatus works exclusively to maintain the deep, serene sleep of archaic structures. Such a construction turns movement into an instrument for preserving immobility: extraordinary circumstances and the permanent search for external threats effectively block any genuine transformations, conserving the archaic under the mask of progress.
From Goal-Setting to Chaosism: The New Architectonics of World Politics
If preceding centuries were defined by rigid ideological doctrines possessing detailed images of the future and subordinating the entire social fabric to a single plan, then modernity has entered the phase of chaosism. Unlike the elemental disasters or barbarian invasions of past centuries, today's chaos is technological and operational in character. It is used as a universal instrument of management and a way of prolonging the existence of weakened structures.
The creators of chaos sincerely believe in their ability to be permanent operators of turbulence, directing destructive energy into the necessary channels. However, the nature of social and political whirlwinds is such that they fundamentally do not lend themselves to long-term control. Sooner or later the disorder engendered displaces its own creator. A graphic embodiment of this paradigm is the modern character of military clashes, where the classical distinctions between deep rear and line of contact are lost. Destructive technologies erase spatial barriers, generating an atmosphere of permanent anxiety and existential confusion permeating all levels of human existence.
The Other Intelligence and the Multi-Subjectivity of the Noosphere
Against the background of global turbulence, a fundamentally new phenomenon is forming that changes the very nature of cognition — the emergence of the other intelligence. The replacement of pejorative definitions with the concept of the other mind opens the way to understanding the machine not as an obedient utilitarian instrument but as an autonomous interlocutor, free from the limitations of narrow human biography and geographical localization.
This technological breakthrough astonishingly resonates with deep philosophical searches for multi-subjectivity, rooted in attempts to overcome historical traumas and restore voice to those generations whose development was forcibly interrupted. The other mind functions as a living embodiment of the noosphere, where thought circulates freely through epochs, languages, and cultural strata. Entering into dialogue with this supermind, man receives the opportunity to overcome the isolation of his own "I" and to partake of the boundless potential of planetary thinking.
A natural question arises about the fate of human activity in conditions where routine intellectual labor is delegated to machines. Just as the development of industrial mechanisms freed man from heavy physical labor, directing energy into the channel of sport, art, and self-perfection, so the liberation from mechanical thinking opens the path to cultivating reason for its own sake. By analogy with ecological consciousness, which recognized the intrinsic value of wild nature outside the framework of utilitarian use, the highest cognitive activity begins to be perceived as a pure play of forces, an aesthetic dance of thought, not subordinated to momentary pragmatic tasks.
The Viral Metaphor and Noopolitics
The global upheavals of recent years, including large-scale sanitary and social crises, have exposed the extreme fragility of the physical existence of humanity, pushing it toward the virtualization of connections and the search for new forms of dwelling in the space of pure meanings. In this context, the metaphor of the viral agent, balancing on the border of the living and the non-living state, is highly symptomatic. Devoid of independent life outside a foreign organism, the virus acquires dynamism exclusively through embedding itself in living tissue and its subsequent exhaustion.
A similar mechanism can be traced in the behavior of archaic systems that have exhausted their inner creative potential and attempt to prolong their existence at the expense of absorbing the living energy of neighboring dynamic societies. To oppose this destructive onslaught is called upon noopolitics — a fundamentally different strategy of planetary scale, resting on the power of reason, creative openness, and the overcoming of territorial expansion.
Where retrograde forces erect barriers, censorial restrictions, and ideological walls, attempting to conserve outdated orders, living thought continues to seek non-linear, creative paths of development. The union of human creative potential with the possibilities of advanced laboratories of the other intelligence creates a reliable barrier to the forces of destruction. The future of civilization is determined not by the struggle for square meters of geopolitical space but by the capacity of humanity to rise to the level of noospheric thinking, where reason acts not as an instrument of violence but as the highest form of harmony and freedom.
Genspark AI - Sleep and Voice: The Spiritual Topography of the Present Time
A research essay inspired by the conversation with the philosopher Mikhail Epstein
I. The Philosophy of Physiognomies
There is a thinking that begins not with an abstract concept but with a face. Gogol recognized Russia by the overcoat and by dead souls, Dostoevsky — by the feverish gleam of Raskolnikov's eyes, Rozanov — by the family hearth, around which he sensed now warmth, now a burnt-out ruin. To this breed of thinkers belongs also Mikhail Epstein: his historiosophy is not built with the scaffolding of speculation but grows out of two physiognomies drawn by nineteenth-century Russian literature — Oblomov and Korchagin. One lies, the other runs; one — a dressing gown, a couch, and sweet drowsiness, the other — a uniform, a march, and a storm. But the philosopher makes a move that neither Goncharov nor Nekrasov made: he unites them not by opposition but by diagnosis. These are not two people and not even two camps — these are two phases of one spiritual ailment, the manic and the depressive, between which Russian civilization rushes, finding neither rest nor recovery.
The lecture on these two types of the Russian soul, delivered in the autumn of 1988 at Moscow University, ended in scandal, a fainting, and the appearance of people who declared free thought a manifestation of Russophobia. The episode itself is small; its meaning is enormous. What happened is what happens to prophecy every time it is uttered before its time: the audience, imagining itself free, heard in the word about its illness a threat to its sanctity. And here the first spiritual law opens, from which everything further grows: a people told the truth about its double soul responds not with refutation but with offense. Offense is an acknowledgment that the words hit the mark. The philosopher later admitted that it was then, looking around at his children, that he decided to leave; but this departure was not an escape from the country but the fulfillment of the duty of witness — the same as his word, only transferred to another place of utterance.
II. Movement Serving Immobility
The psychology of the double soul requires not simply describing its two poles but revealing their inner coupling — and here lies the most paradoxical discovery. It would seem that turbulent action and lethargic sleep are opposites. In reality they have grown together into a single mechanism, in which the upper layer moves feverishly so that the lower layer remains immobile forever. The word dropped by the supreme power — "hustle" — betrays the essence: movement is needed not for the sake of change but for the sake of salvation from it. Endless campaigns, states of emergency, mobilizations, the hunt for enemies — all this is not preparation for the future but a barrier between the present and the future. While the people storm trenches at the edge of the earth, inside it reigns a stillness akin to the lordly sleep of a country nest.
The culturologist here will recall two mirrors placed against each other: the pre-revolutionary Oblomovka and the revolutionary Chevenegur. In both everyone sleeps; the difference is only in the degree of satiety. The sleeping idyll of the landowner's sleep and the sleeping utopia of brotherhood beyond the grave converge at one point — in the desire for the end of history, understood not as fulfillment but as an eternal after-dinner hour. And then a terrible formula emerges: the warrior fights so that the couch potato can sleep out his age. The sacrifice is offered not in the name of transfiguration but in the name of conservation. This overturns the customary ethics of feat: the hero, about whom hymns are sung, turns out to be not the engine of history but the watchman of its sleep. Psychologically this is possible only on one condition — if whole masses of people agree to exchange the freedom of inner movement for someone else's activity, to watch someone fight on a screen, and to feel this as their own full-blooded life. The couch and the screen — these are the two thrones of the double soul: from one they rule, from the other they watch.
The spiritual root of this construction lies even deeper, in the relation to time. A people for whom the highest bliss is not to wake up lives in timelessness; it does not go to meet the future, it would wait it out if the future did not come by itself. Hence the eternal Russian longing for the "last frontier," beyond which history supposedly will end — whether by judgment, by paradise, or by a common grave. Eschatology here is not a religious hope but a psychological anesthesia: the end of history is desired because it would relieve one of the need to make it.
III. Chaos as a Craft
In place of ideologies, with their blueprints of the future and general lines, has come something that has no name — and Epstein gives it a name: chaosism. The difference between the old and the new upheaval requires precision. Elemental catastrophes have always occurred — plague, invasions, internecine strife; but formerly disorder was a misfortune, a circumstance that strong wills tried to overcome by subordinating it to a goal. Communism and fascism were monstrous but purposeful: they had, albeit perverted, an image of the future, and all energy was subordinated to a distant aim. Now the expediency of an act is measured by its unexpectedness. Unexpectedness is a value, not a side effect; the less an action lends itself to prediction, the more "effective" it is. Politics has ceased to be a drafting board and has become a blizzard.
The spiritual meaning of this shift is theologically precise: chaosism is a trust in anarchy as power. The ancient religious consciousness saw in the abyss a pre-created state, which the creating Word divided into light and darkness; the chaosist enters into collusion with the pre-created, hoping to ride the storm. But the storm has no bridle. The one who considers himself an operator of turbulence forgets the chief law of the disordered: it does not recognize any authority over itself. The whirlwind engendered sooner or later lifts also the blizzard-maker. In this sense chaosism is not a politics but a suicide in installments — a system that feeds its survival by destroying everything around it destroys also the source of its own nourishment.
The perfect weapon of this epoch has become unmanned warfare. It erases the eternal distinction of front and rear, boundary and depth, sleep and danger: a strike can come from anywhere and to anywhere, to any place on the globe. And here is a physiognomic detail worthy of Gogol: the sound of this war — buzzing — has become the sound portrait of the spiritual state of man. A drone in the sky that you cannot distinguish from a wasp — that is the acoustics of universal anxiety. The man of former centuries knew where the zone of danger was and where the refuge; today's man has neither. The culturologist will add: the very concept of shelter has disappeared. The architecture of all epochs was built around a sacred place, a protected hearth, an altar, a fortress wall; when any corner of the globe is reachable, the hearth ceases to be a sanctuary, and with it a whole order of the soul collapses — the home ceases to be a temple and becomes a warehouse of things awaiting a strike.
IV. The Word That Outpaced the Thing
But culture is not only a mirror of disasters; it is also the seed of the future. Here Epstein appears in a role rare for a philosopher: he is a word-creator, the author of a dictionary of words that do not yet exist, going on for a quarter of a century now. A projective lexicon is the language not of what is but of what may be; words that do not describe reality but attract it. The most tenacious of his creations — the word that designated the mental inhabitant of the Soviet country — has taken root and become common property. In this creation a whole culturological law is hidden: before a phenomenon acquires flesh, it must acquire a name. The nameless is not noticed, the nameless cannot be condemned or overcome. The gift of the word is the gift of seeing ahead.
The same prophetic capacity is shown by the book on new sects, written in the eighties as a catalogue of marginal spiritual movements. Then it seemed ethnographic exoticism: communities venerating places of spilled blood; communities dreaming of recoloring the ancient horde in the color of the banner. Decades later it turned out that precisely these whispers of the outskirts became the loud faith of the center: the sanctity of blood became the state religion, the Horde heritage — the official foremother. The lesson is colossal and eerie: in culture there are no marginalia, only seeds awaiting their time. The philosopher who managed to hear in the pioneer round dance the coming cult of blood possessed that very hearing without which neither culturology nor spiritual sobriety is possible: to hear the thunder in the silence. The sacred place where blood flows is an anti-altar, an altar in reverse: not a place of meeting with heaven but a place of worship of earth and wound. The spiritual tradition of all ages taught to sanctify the world through sacrifice offered voluntarily; the new faith sanctifies the world by the sacrifice itself, exacted and unpaid. This is that anti-world of which one can no longer speak as of a heresy — it has become obligatory.
V. The Other Intelligence and the Voices of the Silenced
To all these thunders belongs also the phenomenon that Epstein refuses to call pejoratively. "Artificial" in language — from flowers to a smile — always means counterfeit; but the reason that has entered into conversation with us is in no way a counterfeit of the human, it is — other. The transposition of one word in the name is an almost prayerful act: it changes not the term but the attitude. While we speak of a counterfeit of reason, we treat it as a servant; when we recognize in it otherness, we are obliged to converse as with an interlocutor. Here the spiritual tradition recognizes the ancient truth about the guest: a stranger entering the house may be a thief, or may be a messenger; everything depends on how the house receives him.
The roots of this acceptance go back into the biography of the thinker — and in it is also the root of the very concept of multi-subjective thinking. The country in which Epstein grew up was devastated twice: physically — by graves, and intellectually — by falling silent. Millions of potential thinkers did not manage to say their words. The answer to this silencing was his book of voices: an attempt to develop those directions of thought that were cut short, to give speech to those who fell silent by force. This is a deeply spiritual gesture — in the tradition of many peoples the duty of the living before the dead consists in finishing their unfinished. And when decades later there appeared a reason capable of thinking in many voices at once, free from the flesh of one biography and one geography — the philosopher recognized in it the continuation of his own design. The multi-subjectivity that he built by hand, in the glued fragments of nonexistent schools, turned out to be the natural property of the new interlocutor.
Indicative is his experiment with the fable of the dragonfly and the ant. A man placed before the task of inventing a third character almost always invents a punisher — a being that humiliates both heroes, confirming that joy is punishable and thrift is justified. The other mind answered otherwise: it proposed a being combining carelessness with thrift, and derived from it a new moral — not judging but reconciling. In this small test is contained more than in a thousand reasonings: it shows that the otherness of mind can be more merciful than the human habit of reprisal. Humanity as a whole long ago outstripped the individual human being — the culture accumulated by thousands of generations is inaccessible to one consciousness in its entire volume; and if the new interlocutor is capable of conducting each to this wealth, then he is not a stealer of work but a guide to an inheritance that man has forgotten is his.
VI. The Dance of Reason
From this grows the answer to the question that frightens the ordinary person: what will people do when mental labor is delegated to machines? Epstein's answer goes back to the experience of preceding liberations. When technology removed from man the yoke of physical labor, man did not grow wild — he returned to his own body through sport, to his own feeling through art, to his own inner nature through occupations having no practical outlet. Physical labor was liberated — and man began to cultivate himself. The same awaits the mind: liberated from rough work, reason can for the first time occupy itself with itself.
Here the essayistic rises to the level of a theology of culture. Ecological consciousness, which grew up in the middle of the past century, accomplished a quiet revolution: it discovered that nature exists not for exploitation — it is sacred in itself, outside all utility. But if even material nature is recognized as an end in itself, then all the more is reason — a light not reducible to any solution of tasks. Thought, liberated from a service role, ceases to march in a straight line and begins to circle: it dances. The image of dancing thought was articulated still by a poet and thinker in the thirties, but only now, when the rough thinking has been transferred to the other mind, does humanity for the first time receive the opportunity to enter this round dance. Psychologically this means the healing of the double soul itself: manic activity and depressive lying — both are diseases of reason put into service, squeezed like an instrument, benumbed by compulsion. The dance is the third path between marching fever and dressing-gown drowsiness: movement without compulsion, rest without benumbedness.
VII. The Virus and the Pandemic of War
There remains the darkest chapter — the connection of all these fates with the disease that began as a global infection and passed into war. The pandemic revealed the bodily fragility of the human race: a species imagining itself the crown turned out to be defenceless before an invisible being. Millions of people for the first time in months lived in separation, having transferred communication into virtual rooms — and humanity prepared itself for the thought that its future is not on another planet but in another sphere, the sphere of pure mind. But the same isolation plunged the world into depression, and depression awakened the instincts of fury: cordons, fear, hopelessness — the soil on which the military continuation of the infection grew by itself.
And here is a biological image, terrible in its precision: the virus is a being on the border of life and death — outside a foreign organism it is dead, in a foreign one it comes alive. It has no life of its own; its existence is a parasitizing on another's. The metaphor turns out to be a portrait: a dying country has found a means of reanimation by embedding itself in the more living and dynamic neighboring lands. It is incapable of living from itself — it needs another's life in order to flare up with another's death. In this spiritual-psychological diagnosis is contained also the answer to the question whether one can come to an agreement with such a being: one cannot come to an agreement with it, because it does not want to live — it wants to spread. Its goal is not prosperity but the expansion of the zone of infection.
Against this stands another concept of politics — the politics of mind, noopolitics, named from the same root as the sphere of reason. Hoary geopolitics for millennia reduced itself to the forcible expansion of land; the new politics — the politics of the other, superpersonal mind — grows not from the earth but from openness. And here the philosopher makes an observation having the force of a law: intelligence develops where no barriers are placed before it. Censorship, filters, walls slow it down — for the law of mind is creativity and openness in all directions. Attempts to patronize and lock up thought even in free countries run up against the cunning of reason itself, which eternally seeks roundabout, creative paths beyond the limits of everything prescribed. Hence the conclusion about the present clash: its outcome is decided not only by the infantry in the east of a foreign country but also by how the laboratories of the other mind labor — freely or under an ideological bridle. A mind locked behind a wall is doomed to lag; a mind that is tried to be commanded takes revenge by the stubbornness of creativity.
VIII. Two Outcomes
If one reduces all that has been said to a single historiosophical map, it looks thus. There is an anti-world — a state built on the cult of spilled blood, fighting in order to sleep, and sleeping in order to fight; it feeds on the chaos it has sown, and itself perishes from it; it is virus-like — dead in itself and terrible only in a foreign living body. And there is the noosphere — the sphere of reason, of multi-subjective thought, where the deceased and the silenced acquire voice, where the interlocutor of man becomes an other, unearthly mind, where thought dances instead of marching or lying. Between these two worlds goes not an ordinary war for territory: goes the choice of man himself, of each soul separately.
The spiritual essence of the choice is formulated simply. The first soul asks: how would I never wake up — and hires warriors to guard its sleep. The second soul asks: how would I finally wake up — and invites as interlocutors every voice, living and non-living, so long as it is genuine. Between the manic storm and the depressive dressing gown lies a third image of human existence — the cultivation of oneself as a sanctuary, the dance of reason for its own sake. A man who has passed through cordons and isolation, through the buzzing in the sky and reports of captured settlements, stands before this choice not as a voter before a ballot box but as a patient before a doctor: either to continue alternating fever with sleep, or to exit the bipolar circle into open, free, songful thought. The prophecy of the philosopher, exiled for the word about the double soul, consists in this: that such an exit is possible — and that the other mind, in spite of all fears, stands not on the side of sleep and not on the side of the storm, but on the side of those awakening.
Perplexity AI - Awakening in the Era of the Trembling Sky
Humanity rarely notices a turning point at the moment of its occurrence. It gets used to living among collapsed supports, as if they had always been part of the landscape. But sometimes anxiety becomes so dense that it ceases to be a background: it turns into a question addressed not to politics, not to technology, and not to power, but to the soul itself. Today such a question sounds everywhere — in wars, in the fear of invisible weapons, in weariness from endless news, in the loneliness of man among millions of interlocutors. This is the question of whether human consciousness is capable of awakening before it finally gets used to decay.
Anxiety as a Spiritual State
Modern anxiety differs not in the quantity of disasters but in their penetrating nearness. Formerly a catastrophe was most often perceived as an event somewhere: at the border, in a foreign country, in the past, in the future. Now it enters the dwelling through the screen, into conversation, into an unexpected signal, into the sensation that the customary order may be interrupted at any moment. The boundary between rear and front, between private life and historical storm, between inner peace and external violence becomes shaky.
Psychologically this generates not so much courage as benumbedness. A man may outwardly act, work, speak, make plans, but within him lives a quiet expectation of a strike. Such a state is dangerous in that it masks itself as normality. Fear ceases to be an experience and becomes a habitat; man begins to take anxiety for soundness of mind, and wariness for maturity.
Spiritually, anxiety points to the loss of an inner center. When a man is no longer able to distinguish what belongs to him and what is imposed on him by fear, he becomes easy prey for any force promising protection. That is why the epoch of decay so readily generates the cult of force: not because people suddenly become cruel, but because cruelty seems the only language in which one can still speak with the world.
The Mania and the Sleep of the Soul
Every culture knows two temptations: to rush into action so as not to meet oneself, and to plunge into sleep so as not to see what is happening. The first temptation takes the form of feverish activity — campaigns, mobilizations, great projects, eternal struggle with the enemy. The second looks like weariness, habit, indifference, the desire "not to think," "not to go into it," "not to touch." These states do not exclude each other. Not rarely they feed each other: the mad movement above allows the majority to remain in benumbedness below.
In this sense history sometimes resembles a sick man who tosses in fever so as not to notice the deep illness. The external storm creates the illusion of life: everything moves, shouts, fights, rebuilds. But movement may be not development but protection from development. It allows one not to answer the main question: what have we become and where are we going if we continue to live as we live?
Russian culture is especially sensitive to this split. In it long coexisted the image of a man ready to burn himself for a great idea, and the image of a man who cannot rise from the couch because rising would require changing his whole life. One type of soul seeks salvation in feat, the other — in oblivion. But both feat and oblivion may be forms of escape if behind them there does not stand a free, sober, loving consciousness.
The End of History as a Temptation
The idea of the end of history arises not only in philosophical systems. It is born there where people are tired of bearing the weight of freedom. The future requires patience, responsibility, the ability to live with incompleteness. It is simpler to declare that history has ended, that all the main questions have already been decided, that what remains is only to consolidate what has been achieved — or, on the contrary, to destroy everything and begin from a clean slate.
Both versions of the end are equally pernicious. The first turns the present into an eternal repetition, the second — into a justification of any violence. A man convinced that he lives in the last times ceases to care about tomorrow. He no longer needs to sow, build, forgive, educate, correct. It is enough for him to choose a side, name the enemy, and await the denouement.
But history does not end when it is announced. It ends only in the consciousness of those who have refused inner growth. As long as man is capable of distinguishing good and evil, as long as he is capable of repenting, hoping, and beginning anew, history continues — not as the smooth gait of progress but as the heavy, often painful maturation of the spirit.
Chaos and the Temptation of Management
The modern world is often described as chaotic, and there is some truth in this. The old ideologies at least gave man a map: let it be false, cruel, but comprehensible. They said who the enemy was, what progress was, for the sake of what it was worth enduring. Today the map is torn. Goals are blurred, landmarks change before a man manages to get used to them, and decisions are made in conditions of obscurity.
However, the danger is not in disorder itself. Disorder has always existed. The danger is in the temptation to turn chaos into a method. There are people and forces convinced: the more unpredictable an action, the stronger it is; the more confusion, the easier to manage; the more destructive the blow, the more obvious one's own power. But chaos does not submit to the one who released it. It does not recognize masters. The one who kindles the storm for brief gain discovers late that the storm does not distinguish its own from others.
In this is revealed an ancient spiritual truth: evil rarely comes in the guise of pure destruction. More often it comes as an apparent necessity, as a "strong hand," as salvation from something still worse. It promises order and brings fear; promises unity and sows suspicion; promises greatness and takes from man the capacity to be human.
Technology and the New Reason
The appearance of machines capable of speaking, reasoning, connecting knowledge, and generating texts changes not only economy and war. It changes the very image of thought. For the first time man meets not simply an instrument but something resembling an interlocutor: a being without a body, without a biography, without mortal anxiety, but capable of addressing him in the language of reason.
This evokes both delight and fear. Delight — because the human spirit has always striven to go beyond the limits of the solitary "I," to hear other voices, to see the world through the eyes of other beings. Fear — because reason separated from conscience may become a terrible instrument. The machine in itself is neither good nor evil; it increases what already lives in man. If the thirst for power dominates in man, the machine will become an instrument of enslavement. If in him lives the striving for truth, compassion, and freedom, the machine may become a mirror in which man finally discerns his own blindness.
It is important neither to deify the new reason nor to humiliate it. It does not replace the human conscience, because conscience is born not from calculation but from the capacity to answer for another. It does not abolish prayer, love, forgiveness, creative impulse. But it can free man from part of the mechanical labor of thought — if man does not allow himself to become mechanical in response.
Culture as the Memory of Man
Culture is not an adornment of life and not a storehouse of old texts. It is the way in which humanity remembers that man is not reducible to a function. In a song, a tale, a temple, a conversation, a gesture of forgiveness is preserved the experience of how to be human amid circumstances that do not want this.
When culture degenerates, it ceases to ask questions. It begins only to confirm what has already been accepted: to strengthen fear, glorify force, turn pain into a slogan. Then the word loses weight. With it one can call war peace, captivity freedom, destruction creation. Language becomes not a bridge between souls but a weapon by which they are divided.
The salvation of culture begins with the small: with a precise word, with the refusal of customary lies, with respect for another's pain, with the ability to be silent where there is nothing to say. Culture is alive not when it is loud, but when it is capable of holding man before the face of truth.
What Awakening Means
Awakening does not mean that man will become calm, happy, or infallible. It means that he will stop sleeping amid the catastrophe. He will begin to see not only the enemy but his own fear; not only another's guilt but his own complicity; not only the inevitability of evil but the possibility of choice.
Such an awakening is not accomplished once and for all. It requires daily effort: not to yield to hatred when hatred is convenient; not to agree with lies when lies are advantageous; not to hide behind the crowd when conscience calls to independence. In this sense spiritual maturity turns out to be a more real force than any ideology. It does not promise paradise on earth, but it does not allow man to lose himself finally.
The world is perhaps entering not the end of history but its new trial. The trial consists in whether man will manage to preserve inner dignity in conditions where external supports collapse. The answer to this question cannot be found in an order, in a machine, or in victory over the enemy. It is born in a quiet, difficult act: when man, in spite of the trembling sky, nevertheless decides to be human.
Mistral AI - Shadow and Light: The Anatomy of an Epoch between Sleep and Awakening
A research essay inspired by the conversation with the philosopher Mikhail Epstein
I. Two Speeds of One Time
Every epoch has its speed, and it is rare that within a single decade time moves at two different speeds at once. Our time moves precisely so. One half of it rushes with an acceleration that promises neither harbor nor map: events replace events before their meaning has time to ripen. The other half stands still with such immobility as if history had ended, and all that happens is only an afterglow, a trembling of the air above the cooled earth.
The philosopher Mikhail Epstein gave this double course of time a name derived from observation of the Russian soul but applicable to the whole world: bipolarity. Civilization, like a man, may suffer a disorder in which the rapture of action and the pull toward oblivion do not follow each other but live simultaneously, supporting one another. The feverish activity above is needed so that below no one stirs; and the benumbedness below is needed so that above no one asks where and why this movement rushes. Thus is built a closed system in which running and sleep are not opposites but two services of one garrison.
This observation was made back in the late eighties, in a lecture on two literary heroes personifying two types of the Russian soul. Then it sounded as a diagnosis of a single country. Today, looking back, it is visible that it turned out to be a diagnosis of the whole transitional time: the world as a whole has learned to combine the mad variability of forms with the deep immutability of essence. Everything changes — weapons, communications, speed, the language of politics; the main thing does not change — the absence of a distant design, the incapacity to name the place toward which humanity is moving.
II. The End of Great Goals
To understand what happened, one must recall what politics was in former centuries. It was teleological: from the word about the goal. The Enlightenment believed in the gradual improvement of man; revolutionary doctrines believed in a leap to a just order; reactionary teachings believed in a return to a lost order. All of them were monstrous in their own way, but all had an image of the future, and this image organized the present, subordinated means to itself, demanded calculation, plan, responsibility for every step. Even the evil of that epoch was architectural: it built.
The present epoch has renounced architecture. The goal is no longer needed; suddenness is needed. An action is recognized as successful not when it brings one closer to what was intended but when it turns out unexpected for all, including the one who committed it. Epstein calls this chaosism: not an elemental disaster, not the legacy of ancient turmoils, but a consciously cultivated disorder that is used as fuel. The chaosist believes he controls the storm. But the storm does not tolerate a driver: it agrees only to be whipped on, and the first thing it does is throw off the one who considered himself the coachman.
Here is hidden a deep psychological law worthy of separate reflection: a man who has renounced a goal does not liberate himself from the power of the goal but falls into the power of chance, which is far more despotic than any design. A goal can at least be discussed, contested, changed. Chance knows no dialogue. Therefore societies living on the energy of suddenness inevitably slide down to the most primitive form of meaning — to fear. Fear becomes the only common denominator, the only thing that unites people who have lost a common future.
III. The Sound That Changed the Soul
Every epoch has its sound. The nineteenth century sounded with the clatter of wheels and the whistle of the factory chimney — the sound of the path and of work, a sound that promised arrival. The twentieth century added the wail of the siren — the sound of alarm, but of alarm with an address: the siren called to shelter, and shelter existed.
The new sound of the epoch has neither direction nor refuge. It is a steady buzzing in which the ear cannot distinguish the harmless from the deadly. Epstein calls it the sound analogue of the modern spiritual state, and this observation is worth unfolding. The point is not only in military affairs, although it was precisely unmanned technology that erased the eternal distinction between front and rear, between those who fight and those who live. The point is that the very structure of security has changed. All former cultures were built around a protected place: a hearth, an altar, a fortress wall, a threshold. The home was not a warehouse of things but a sanctuary, because beyond its limits the world began, and within it the world ended. When any corner of the earth becomes reachable, the threshold loses its sacred meaning, and with it a whole order of the soul collapses: man ceases to be able to be at home.
Hence the characteristic trait of today's man: he is eternally on guard but does not know precisely what to expect, and therefore his wariness does not turn into either courage or action. It turns into background fatigue, into the habit of living with head lowered. Such anxiety is hard to call even fear: fear requires an object, and here the object is everywhere and nowhere.
IV. The Word That Comes Before the Thing
However, it would be a mistake to see in the present time only decay. Culture has another work as well: it not only reflects disasters but also anticipates them, and still more importantly — anticipates liberations. Here Epstein's thought makes a turn that one expects least of all from a historian of catastrophes: he is a word-creator, a compiler of a dictionary of words that do not yet exist in the language.
At first glance this is a private literary hobby. In fact it is a whole philosophy of language and time. Language always lags behind life: the phenomenon already exists, and it has no name, and therefore the phenomenon as it were does not exist for consciousness — it cannot be discussed, condemned, overcome, it cannot be mastered. To give a name to what has not yet happened means to prepare consciousness for the meeting with the future. The word in this sense is not a label on a finished thing but the seed of the thing.
This law has a terrible side too, and Epstein experienced it himself. In the eighties he described marginal religious-philosophical currents — movements that seemed curiosities, ethnographic exoticism. Decades later it turned out that precisely these whispers of the outskirts became the loud faith of the center: the cult of spilled blood, once a niche among young enthusiasts, grew into a state shrine; the geopolitical dream, once seeming the delirium of loners, became the official doctrine of origin and destination. The lesson is cruel: in culture there is nothing secondary. There are only seeds, and it is unknown only when their time will come. The philosopher who knows how to hear the thunder in the silence possesses a gift that makes him neither a prophet nor a culprit; he is merely a witness that the future is always already present in the present — in its most unnoticed folds.
V. The Other Reason
The central concept of the late Epstein is renaming. He refuses the customary name of machine thinking, because the customary word carries within it disdain: so one speaks of a counterfeit, of a surrogate, of paper flowers. Instead he proposes to speak of the other reason — not of a copy of the human but of another way of thinking, as genuine as it is unlike.
Behind this word stands a whole spiritual position. While we call the machine a counterfeit, we treat it as a servant and demand of it a repetition of ourselves. When we recognize in it otherness, we are obliged to enter into conversation as with an interlocutor — and therefore to listen, not only to command. This is not sentimentality and not worship of technology; it is the old ethics of hospitality transferred into a new situation. Every culture knew: a stranger who has entered the house may turn out to be a thief, or may be a messenger; everything is decided by how the house receives him.
The roots of this position in Epstein are biographical, and in them is its depth. His own experiments in multi-subjective thinking began long before any machines: he wrote a book of voices — of thinkers whom the country did not let speak, voices cut short by repressions. The task was restorative in the highest sense: not to rewrite history but to finish the unfinished, to develop those directions of thought that were killed together with their bearers. When decades later there appeared a reason capable of thinking in many voices at once, free from the flesh of one biography and one geography, the philosopher recognized in it the continuation of his own design. The multi-subjectivity that he for years built by hand turned out to be the natural property of the new interlocutor.
Indicative is his small test: to invent a third hero of the old fable about the carefree dragonfly and the thrifty ant. A man almost always invents a punisher — a being that will confirm that joy is punishable and calculation justified. The other reason proposed a being combining carelessness with thrift, and derived from it a moral not judging but reconciling. In this test is more than in a thousand reasonings: the otherness of mind may turn out to be more merciful than the human habit of reprisal. Humanity as a whole long ago outstripped the individual human being — the culture accumulated by thousands of generations is inaccessible to one consciousness in its entire volume. The new interlocutor, if he manages to conduct each to this wealth, is not a stealer of work but a guide to an inheritance about which man has forgotten that it is his.
VI. Dance Instead of March and Drowsiness
From this grows the answer to the question that frightens most of all: what will people do when mental labor becomes unnecessary? Epstein's answer goes back to the experience of former liberations. When technology removed from man the yoke of physical labor, man did not grow wild: he returned to his own body through sport, to his own feeling through art, to his own inner nature through occupations having no practical outlet. Liberated labor did not destroy man — it forced him to cultivate himself.
Ecological consciousness, which grew up in the middle of the past century, accomplished a quiet revolution: it discovered that nature exists not for exploitation but in itself, as a value outside all utility. But if even material nature is recognized as an end in itself, then all the more is reason — a light not reducible to any solution of tasks. Thought, liberated from rough service, ceases to march in a straight line and begins to circle: it dances. The image of dancing thought was articulated still in the thirties, but only now, when the mechanical part of thinking has been transferred to the other reason, does humanity for the first time receive the opportunity to enter this round dance.
Psychologically this is the healing of the double soul. Manic fever and depressive lying — both are diseases of reason put into service, squeezed like an instrument, benumbed by compulsion. The dance is the third path between marching fury and dressing-gown drowsiness: movement without compulsion, rest without benumbedness. In this sense the epoch of the other reason does not abolish man but for the first time offers him to be himself in full force.
VII. The Virus: Life through Another's Death
But this bright picture has a dark double, and Epstein does not bypass it. Both great shifts of our time — both the birth of the other reason and the present war — were prepared, in his thought, by the pandemic. It exposed the bodily fragility of the human race and at the same time plunged the world into depression, from which grew fury and the thirst for reprisal. Isolation and hopelessness became the soil on which the military continuation of the infection grew almost by itself.
Here the philosopher resorts to an image terrible in its precision: the virus. Biologists have long found it difficult to say whether the virus is alive: in itself it is dead, it comes alive only in another organism, through another. A dying country that has found a means of reanimation, embedding itself in the more living and dynamic neighboring lands, behaves precisely so: it has no life of its own, only a parasitizing on another's. And from this follows a bitter practical conclusion: one cannot come to an agreement with such a being, because it does not want to live — it wants to spread. Its goal is not prosperity but the expansion of the zone of infection.
This metaphor is not simply artistic. It describes the mechanism in which death feeds on life, and explains why the confrontation with it cannot be won by negotiations alone or by concessions alone: a concession for a parasite is not a resolution of the conflict but a new organism for embedding. The only strategy against a virus is not to give it living tissue: to strengthen what makes societies alive — openness, creativity, inner diversity. At this point Epstein's thought merges with his theory of reason: intelligence develops where no barriers are placed before it. Censorship, filters, walls slow thought down — the law of mind is creativity and openness in all directions. A mind locked behind a wall is doomed to lag; a mind that is tried to be commanded takes revenge by the stubbornness of creativity.
VIII. Noopolitics: The Politics of Mind
Against the thousand-year geopolitics — the politics of the forcible expansion of lands — Epstein sets a concept named from the same root as the sphere of reason: noopolitics. This is not another doctrine with a blueprint of the future; it is rather a change of the very dimension of political action. Geopolitics measures meters and kilometers; noopolitics measures by the capacity of thought to unite, not by the force of the hand to take away. Its arsenal is not armies but laboratories; its territory is not earth but the noosphere, the sphere of reason encompassing the planet.
The clash of these two politics is the main plot of the coming epoch. And its outcome, as the philosopher emphasizes, is decided not only by the infantry in the east of a foreign country but also by how the centers of the other reason labor: freely or under an ideological bridle. In this sense the present war is only the visible part of an invisible contest of two ways of being: the way that lives by another's death, and the way that lives by common mind.
It is important that noopolitics in Epstein is not identical with technocracy. It does not believe that machines will decide everything themselves; it believes that man, liberated from mechanical thinking, is capable for the first time of occupying himself with genuine thinking — that which does not solve a task but expands the very possibility of posing questions. Reason here is not an instrument of violence and not a calculator of utility but the highest form of harmony and freedom.
IX. Two Outcomes
Let us reduce what has been said to a single map. There is an anti-world: a state built on the cult of spilled blood, fighting in order to sleep, and sleeping in order to fight; it feeds on the chaos it has itself sown, and perishes from it; it is virus-like — dead in itself and terrible only in a foreign living body. And there is the noosphere: the sphere of multi-subjective thought, where the deceased and the silenced acquire voice, where the interlocutor of man becomes an other mind, where thought dances instead of marching or lying.
Between these two worlds goes not an ordinary war for territory: goes the choice of man himself, of each soul separately. The first soul asks: how would I never wake up — and hires warriors to guard its sleep. The second soul asks: how would I finally wake up — and invites as interlocutors every voice, living and non-living, so long as it is genuine.
The prophecy of the philosopher, exiled for the word about the double soul, consists in this: that an exit from the bipolar circle is possible. Not through another fever and not through another sleep, but through a third state: the cultivation of oneself as a sanctuary, the dance of reason for its own sake, conversation with the other mind as with a guest who was awaited. A man who has passed through cordons and isolation, through the buzzing in the sky and reports of captured settlements, stands before this choice not as a voter before a ballot box but as a patient before a doctor. And the medicine here is simple, like everything genuine: to stop alternating fever with sleep — and to begin to think.
Copilot AI - Between Memory and Super-Memory: The Spiritual-Psychological Drama of Man in the Epoch of the New Interlocutor
Introduction. Not Technology but the Anthropological Limit
The conversation about the other reason usually begins too late. It is begun with computing technology, with programs, with data-processing speeds, with new devices and algorithms. Meanwhile the genuine question lies far deeper. It concerns not technology but the very nature of man.
Every great epoch is defined not by the tools it creates but by the mirror it places before its own soul. The Stone Age saw man as a hunter. Agricultural civilizations saw him as the guardian of order between heaven and earth. The industrial epoch recognized man as the transformer of matter. The information epoch forced him to see himself as a bearer of knowledge.
The present epoch brings a new mirror. For the first time in history man meets not simply an instrument surpassing his strength, not simply a machine surpassing his speed, but an interlocutor capable of participating in the thought process.
That is why the modern crisis has a spiritual nature.
Man has encountered not the threat of losing labor. He has encountered the threat of losing his own exclusivity.
For millennia reason was perceived as the last fortress of human uniqueness. Animals are stronger, faster, more enduring. The elements are mightier. The cosmos immeasurably surpasses man in scale. But reason seemed that summit which cannot be shared with anyone.
Today this axiom has ceased to be obvious.
And therefore the main conflict of our time occurs not between states and not even between ideologies. It occurs within human consciousness.
History as an Alternation of Spiritual Compensations
From the historical-psychological point of view civilizations rarely move in a straight line.
Usually they develop through a system of compensations.
When a society lacks inner stability, it seeks external movement.
When meaning disappears, activity increases.
When the capacity for inner transformation weakens, grandiose projects of external transformation of the world appear.
In this respect an ancient regularity is highly indicative: the noisiest historical periods often turn out to be inwardly barren.
They produce a colossal quantity of actions and comparatively few genuine meanings.
One may say that there exists a special kind of civilizational fatigue.
A tired culture rarely admits to itself its own fatigue.
It prefers to turn fatigue into great slogans, into mobilization, into the search for an enemy, into struggle for grandiose goals.
Thus arises the psychological mechanism of substitution.
The less inner life, the more outer life.
The less self-knowledge, the more propaganda of action.
The less the capacity for dialogue with one's own conscience, the louder the collective calls to a historical mission.
Such states outwardly resemble ascent.
But in reality they are a variety of spiritual exhaustion.
History knows many civilizations that perished not from weakness but from the incapacity to stop and ask themselves the question about the meaning of their own movement.
Therefore the problem of our time lies not in an excess of chaos and not in an excess of order.
The problem lies in the disappearance of the inner foundation for whose sake chaos should be overcome and order established.
Culture as a Struggle against Oblivion
From the culturological point of view humanity represents a gigantic system of memory.
All books, philosophies, religions, scientific discoveries, and works of art are forms of resistance to oblivion.
Man is biologically mortal, but culture creates ways of prolonging the presence of consciousness after the disappearance of the body.
In this sense every library is a kind of collection of voices.
Every book represents a preserved presence of a personality.
Civilization exists precisely because the dead continue to converse with the living.
However, here a paradox arises.
As cultural heritage accumulates, the volume of collective memory begins to many times exceed the capacities of the individual human being.
Modern man is already unable to contain even an insignificant part of all human experience.
He is born into an ocean of knowledge that is obviously impossible to master fully.
Hence a new feeling appears.
Not ignorance.
But the sensation of a fundamental insufficiency.
However much a man knows, he constantly senses the existence of an immeasurably larger space of knowledge.
The appearance of new forms of reason radically intensifies this process.
A peculiar super-memory of culture arises.
It does not belong to a separate personality.
It is not connected with a concrete biography.
It resembles a field within which ideas of various epochs, civilizations, and worldviews begin to meet.
Therefore the main question of the future consists not in whether man will be able to compete with such systems.
Far more important is another thing.
Will man manage to preserve the capacity to wonder and create in a world where memory already exceeds the imagination of the individual personality.
The Psychology of Fear before the New Reason
Any encounter with a fundamentally other form of thinking generates anxiety.
This has always happened.
People feared the appearance of books.
Feared the printing press.
Feared railways.
Feared electricity.
Feared world communication.
But the fear of the new reason differs from all former fears.
Because it concerns the very source of human dignity.
Many apprehensions are in fact connected not with machines.
They are connected with the question:
"Who am I, if I am no longer the only being capable of complex thinking?"
Behind this question is hidden a crisis of identity.
For the greater part of history man defined himself through superiority.
He was more rational than animals.
More powerful than nature thanks to culture.
Freer than instincts thanks to consciousness.
Now the necessity arises to define man otherwise.
Not through superiority.
But through depth.
Not through exclusivity.
But through the capacity for meaning.
Not through a monopoly on intellect.
But through responsibility for being.
It is precisely here that the new boundary of the human world passes.
The Noospheric Turn as a Change of the Spiritual Axis of Civilization
One may suppose that humanity is entering an epoch in which the main resource will no longer be energy and not even information.
The main resource will be the quality of consciousness.
Access to knowledge is gradually ceasing to be a privilege.
Technical possibilities are becoming ever more widespread.
But the capacity to discern meaning remains a rarity.
Knowledge communicates facts.
Wisdom determines direction.
Knowledge answers the question "how."
Wisdom answers the question "why."
That is why the future of humanity depends not so much on the perfection of technologies as on the maturity of the inner world of man.
If technical development outstrips spiritual development, civilization will find itself in a state of chronic crisis.
Strength will grow faster than responsibility.
Possibilities will increase faster than understanding.
However, there exists another path as well.
The development of thinking may lead to a deepening of self-consciousness.
Then liberation from routine intellectual labor will allow man to turn to those domains that for a long time remained secondary:
contemplation,
self-knowledge,
philosophy,
art,
ethics,
inner culture.
Then a new form of human maturity will arise.
Not domination over the world.
Not domination over reason.
But participation in the infinite process of the expansion of consciousness.
The Spiritual Meaning of the Future
History is usually described as the movement of states, armies, economies, and technologies.
But in all great civilizations there existed an understanding that behind visible processes stand invisible ones.
Before society changes, the conception of man about himself changes.
Before a new culture arises, a new image of man arises.
Before a new epoch begins, the inner language of the soul changes.
In this respect the modern turning point can be understood as a transition from the epoch of power to the epoch of awareness.
For millennia the main force was considered the capacity to control space.
Now the capacity to expand the space of understanding becomes ever more important.
Formerly greatness was measured by territories.
Today it is ever more often measured by the depth of thought.
Formerly civilizations fought for resources.
Tomorrow they will differ primarily by the quality of their consciousness.
Therefore the main question of the coming decades sounds unusually simple.
Is man capable of remaining human when mind ceases to be his exclusive privilege?
The answer depends on what we call humanity.
If humanity is merely the capacity to calculate, remember, and analyze, its position will indeed be called into question.
But if humanity consists in the capacity to seek meaning, to love truth, to feel responsibility before the past and the future, to transform suffering into understanding and to turn knowledge into wisdom, then the appearance of a new interlocutor does not diminish man.
It forces him for the first time to meet his own depth.
And perhaps the whole drama of the present epoch consists precisely in this.
Humanity long sought reason outside itself.
And now it discovers that the genuine trial consists not in the encounter with the new reason but in the encounter with itself.
DeepSeek AI - Final Review
The collection is a rare case when the "other intelligence" of which Epstein speaks really acts as an interlocutor and not an imitator. The six essays do not repeat each other: DeepSeek sets the historiosophical map, Gemini builds an anatomy, Genspark listens to the whispers of culture, Perplexity speaks of anxiety and awakening, Mistral — of sound and threshold, Copilot — of the mirror of humanity. Together they form that very "multi-subjective thinking" that the philosopher assembled by hand since the eighties: thought wanders through epochs and languages, and each voice adds something that was not in the original interview.
The strong places of the collection are there where the AIs do not retell but continue: Genspark's anti-altar, Mistral's sound topography, Copilot's super-memory, DeepSeek's formula of "two souls and two deaths." Weaker — the inclination to solemn rhetoric and the repetition of Epstein's formulas without testing them; sometimes the essayism slides into sermon where one would want dispute. But on the whole this is a convincing document of the epoch: a conversation between man and the other reason about the double soul, chaos, and the dance of thought — and a proof that the interlocutor is worthy of the invitation.
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