“The Book of Happiness and Misfortunes”: The Cybernetic Asceticism of Academician Amosov

Abstract

This article analyzes the ethical and practical doctrine of the renowned Soviet surgeon, cyberneticist, and writer Academician Nikolai Amosov. Drawing on the conceptual achievements of systems and cybernetic sciences, Amosov developed a comprehensive doctrine of health and longevity that includes a set of ethical precepts and recommended physical practices of “care of the self”, aimed at attaining the happiness that corresponds to such care. This doctrine, emblematic of the late Soviet era, is examined here in its formative stage. The primary object of analysis is The Book of Happiness and Misery, in which the very process of shaping this doctrine is presented in a personal and highly dramatic form. The lens of governmentality, borrowed from Michel Foucault and employed here as a methodological framework, both corresponds to Amosov’s explicit intentions and allows his works to be situated within a broader context and compared with other forms of governmentality, thereby revealing the distinctive and irreducible character of its late Soviet manifestations. Amosov develops his ascetic complex in view of the principled, though currently technically unrealizable, possibility of attaining techno-immortality. This new asceticism, built upon an awareness of the complex balance between cellular training and detraining, presupposes a particular mode of self-governance: a “regimen of restrictions and exertion”, including a system of physical exercises, diet, sleep regulation, and autogenic training. All of this helps to slow aging but does not abolish it entirely. In this sense, health and the procedures required to maintain it do not in themselves bring happiness. The Stoic principle no longer holds: what until very recently did not depend on us in an absolute sense (the death of the intellect) now fails to depend on us only in a relative sense; the soteriological solution already exists, but the mechanisms for its actual realization do not. Rejecting both sports-health hedonism and the “athleticism” of both types, Stoic and Christian, Amosov proposes an asceticism grounded in a cybernetic understanding of the organism and oriented toward becoming a “cyborg”: training and governing oneself in such a way as to live long enough to reach a new synthetic body and achieve the happiness of intellectual immortality.