“Bodiliness” of thought in N.F. Fedorov’s system of views on language

The article discusses the system of N.F. Fedorov's views on language, as it was immanently formulated in his various articles and notes, laconic, aphoristic and fragmentary. Architecture and scale of Fedorov's ideas along with fundamental incompleteness as a huge project open to the future are considered in the article. An important dominant of Fedorov's thought is ‘bodiliness’, on the one hand, opposed to abstraction that destroys a phenomenon, including reality of human speech, and, on the other, hypostatizing thought and language as organic being. The dominant is essential for understanding culture at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries and the first half of the XX century (for instance, to understand Vladimir Solovyov’s views on the nature of art, the work of Andrei Platonov). ‘Bodiliness’, corporality, materiality of language and thought, according to Fedorov, is the guarantee of immortality of material life. This is the explanation of Fedorov's special attraction to ideographic writing, what embodies thought in matter as “much in little”. Fedorov’s thinking is in a special way consonant with the search for a new style of thinking in Western philosophy at the turn of the 20th century. Fedorov returns to humanitarian knowledge bodily, material; humanitarian knowledge lacks this in order to break away from the surface and move on to the things themselves, which have preserved in their original being the seeds of immortality. The article emphasizes that thought and its linguistic expression are a symbolic designation of the common cause of resurrection in Fedorov’s system, and in this it is material and has concrete outlines. The organic being of thought, belonging to life itself, has no authorship, has no place in a specific work that legitimizes it. The main conclusion of the article is about the central position of the concepts of corporality, ‘bodiliness’ in Fedorov’s project, that at the same time represent, although an integral, but, like conceptual relations in language, incomplete system, where each thought appears as a fragment, a fragment of the world that needs to be recreated.