If we admit that Homo sapiens begins where the animal ends up, and the defining feature of culture is its eternal desire to overcome and put in the service of a man "spontaneous" beginning not only in himself, but also in the world around him, then the question arises: in what ratio are people and their natural environment, or, in other words, how do human culture and "divine" nature interact?
Up to the middle of our century this question seemed clear and did not cause anxiety. Considering the existence of culture in time and space, we have already noted that since antiquity the idea of geographical determinism has been widely spread, showing the influence of natural factors on the emergence and development of individual civilizations. One way or another, humanity was also aware of the feedback - the transforming and "enriching" role of culture in relation to the "wild", "unconquered" nature. However, it should be said that in the past, as, for example, Rousseau, on this occasion there were doubts and rather disturbing prophecies. Perhaps the most famous of them - although the ordinary consciousness still tends to reject them - belonged to Marx and Engels. The first wrote: "...Culture, if it develops spontaneously, not consciously... ...leaves behind a desert..." The second one expressed himself in the same spirit: "However, we will not be too tempted by the victories of man over nature. She takes revenge on us for every such victory. It is true that, firstly, each such victory brings the expected results, but it is also true that, secondly and thirdly, it has various unpredictable effects that often cross out all the positive".
For a very long time, at least in the West, the prevailing view was that after a long period of primitive savagery and lack of shelter a man has the right to claim, if not for "conquest", then at least for the subordination of nature to his rapidly growing material needs - the hidden engine of any culture. Speaking of its "great common task of self-preservation in the struggle against the overwhelming power of nature", 3. Freud, for example, wrote: "It is precisely because of the dangers that nature threatens us that we have come together and created a culture that, among other things, is designed to make our social life possible. After all, the main task of culture, its true justification, is to protect us from nature.
Freud's words above seem to be quite true, but they refer only to a certain stage of existence of the biological species Homo sapiens on Earth. According to very rough anthropological data, man as a living being appeared on our planet many millions of years ago, and his first recorded and more or less distinct "cultural" manifestations have an age of no more than half a million years. At this huge period of time N.A. Berdyaev singles out "four periods in relation to man to nature: 1) man's immersion in nature, 2) the separation from nature, the contrast of nature and the fight against it, 3) the appeal to nature to master it, 4) restoration of man's connection with the soul of nature and spiritual mastery of nature. Freud's words can undoubtedly refer only to the 2nd and 3rd periods of the Berdyah-Jewish scheme and represent the entire history of creative existence of mankind from "paganism" to the modern and far from perfect "civilization".
From the philosophical and anthropological point of view, the artificial environment created by human labor and thought, a peculiar system of extra-biological mechanisms or the so-called "cultural layer" on the surface of the Earth, in its bowels, in the depths of the world ocean, in the atmosphere and now in the near space can be considered as a "second nature".
In clarifying the inextricable link between Culture and Nature, a truly revolutionary role belongs to the outstanding Russian naturalist and thinker Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945). His main merit before his descendants lies in the fact that he organically combined in his extensive work the natural-scientific and humanitarian vision of the world, the science of land and "living matter" with the sciences of man and society, contributing to the transformation of culturology into a comprehensive doctrine of the future, considering the fate of mankind in indissoluble unity with nature and space (the so-called anthropocosmism).
According to his family roots and national outlook, Vernadsky, the son of a liberal St. Petersburg professor from under Poltava and a relative of the famous writer V.G. Korolenko, equally belonged to two great Slavic peoples - Russian and Ukrainian. After graduating from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University, he has been working there as a professor of mineralogy, crystallography and geochemistry since 1890, and in 1911 he moved to St. Petersburg and a year later was elected an academician. In 1918, he was elected an academician. Vernadsky became the first rector of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences founded by him, and later, having returned to Russia, he created the Radium Institute and the first one in the