Evald Ilyenkov on the Cosmology of the Spirit
* Article: The Cosmology of Spirit. “An Attempt to Give a Basic Outline of the Objective Role of Thinking Matter in the System of Universal Interaction (A Philosophical-Poetic Phantasmagoria Based on the Principles of Dialectical Materialism).”. Evald Ilyenkov. Stasis (vol. 5., no. 2, 2017)
URL = https://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/19
Kosmologia dukha was first published in Russian in 1988, in the journal Science and Religion: "The themes and questions of the text are the core questions of materialist ontology: the relations between matter and thought. The text suggests a cosmological hypothesis that links together the emergence of life and human intelligence on earth with the entropic nature of the material universe, and, no less important, with the historical achievement of communism." [1]
Context
According to David Bakhurst, “
"Ilyenkov was important in the revival of Russian Marxist philosophy after the dark days of Stalinism. In the early 1960s, he produced significant work in two main areas. First he wrote at length on Marx’s dialectical method … Second, Ilyenkov developed a distinct solution to what he called ‘the problem of the ideal’; that is, the problem of the place of the non-material in the natural world … After the insightful writings of the early 1960s, Ilyenkov’s inspiration diminished as the political climate became more oppressive … He died in 1979, by his own hand.”
Contextual Quote
"For Ilyenkov, the earth and human beings are merely one form of life in the cosmos. By realizing communism, thinking materially manifests itself as a cosmic event. Communism is therefore a crucial stage in the development of the universe. Drawing on Friedrich Engels’s Dialectics of Nature (1883), Hegel and thermodynamics, Ilyenkov visualizes the cosmos as a circular system that gradually cools down. Ultimately, the earth will die in what Alexei Penzin has called “a gesture of self-destruction on the part of communist reason.”
- Isabel Jacobs [2]
Abstract
"An attempt to give a basic outline of the objective role of thinking matter in the system of universal interaction (A Philosophical-Poetic Phantasmagoria based on the principles of dialectical materialism).
Evald Ilyenkov’s “Cosmology of the Spirit” was written in the 1950s, but published posthumously only at the end of 1980s as it was too heretical to be published during the author’s lifetime. The text was heretical not because it was “dissident” or critical of the Soviet Union where the philosopher lived all his life, but because of its enormously speculative and hypothetical nature. Addressing the physicist idea of the “thermal death of the universe,” and creating an original combination of the Hegelian dialectics and Spinoza’s notion of the attribute, Ilyenkov claims that thought (and the seemingly contingent emergence of “thinking life”) is a necessary attribute of matter, as it is able to prevent the terminal entropic collapse."
(https://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/19)
Description
1. Slavoj Zizek:
"If reality is spatially and temporally without limits, then there is overall, with regard to its totality, no progress. Everything that could happen always-already happened: though full of dynamics in its parts, the universe as a Whole is a Spinozan stable substance. What this means is that, in contrast to Bloch, every development is circular, every movement upwards has to be accompanied by a movement downwards, every progress by a regress: movement is “the cyclical movement from the lowest forms of matter to the highest (‘the thinking brain’) and back, to their decomposition into the lowest forms of matter (biological, chemical, and physical).”
Ilyenkov supplements this vision of the universe with two further hypotheses. First, the movement in cosmos is limited downwards and upwards; it takes place between the lowest level (chaotic matter) and the highest level (thought), such that nothing higher than thought is imaginable. Second, thought is not just a contingent local occurrence in the development of matter; it has a reality and efficiency of its own, a necessary part (a culmination) of the development of the entire reality. And, then, comes Ilyenkov’s most daring cosmological speculation: “the cyclical development of the universe passes through a phase involving the complete destruction of matter — through a galaxy-scale ‘fire’.” This passage through the zero-level which re-launches cosmic development does not happen by itself, but needs a special intervention to re-channel the energy that was radiated during the cycle of matter’s development into a new “global fire.” The question of what (or who) sets the universe on fire is crucial. According to Ilyenkov, it is the cosmological function of thought to provide the conditions to “relaunch” the universe, which is collapsing due to thermal death. It is human intelligence which, having achieved the highest potency, has to launch the big bang. This is how thought proves in reality that it is a necessary attribute of matter."
2. Summary by Alexei Penzin:
"“Matter constantly possesses thought, constantly thinks itself,” begins Ilyenkov. Of course, he doesn’t mean this literally; he’s not trying to suggest, as an idealist or animist might, that matter “thinks.” But since matter had already emerged in human form, and since the universe is infinite, the law of probability dictates that there will always be another complex form of matter that achieves the faculty of thinking, in some space and time. The “thinking brain” always emerges and reproduces itself somewhere in the universe: in this specific sense, “matter constantly thinks itself.”
It is important to comment further on several points here. In the orthodox Soviet “diamat” (the official, dogmatic version of dialectical materialism), matter was understood as an ensemble of its “forms of movement,” i.e., as an ascending hierarchy of development, from the lowest forms, which are covered by the realms of physics, chemistry, and biology, to its highest forms, which are the human brain and intelligence, which in turn shape matter’s “social” form. Each lower form supports the emergence of the higher ones. But then what is the function of the highest form of matter if it does not have anything above it?—this question shapes the field of Ilyenkov’s hypothesis.
These views on the movement of various forms of matter were derived from Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, to which Ilyenkov refers in his text many times. Actually, though, Dialectics of Nature has a bad reputation in the history of Marxist philosophy; it is regarded as the source of the brutal “dialectical laws” that constituted Soviet diamat. However, the text is in fact very insightful and at times ascends to heights of speculative thought that Marx himself would probably have never dared.
The second point in Ilyenkov’s argument evolves from the first: since the universe is infinite in space, its development, paradoxically, is already finished, and everything already exists, including the highest forms of intelligent life. Of course, the dialectics of development nonetheless continues to unfold, in specific parts and zones of the universe that have not yet achieved higher forms of matter’s organization. But if we take matter as a whole, as infinite substance, thinking life is always there. Thus, suggests Ilyenkov, when considered in its totality, matter can be grasped as Spinoza’s substance, eternal and unchangeable. One of the rare commentators on “Cosmology” notes on this point that Spinoza had exactly the same “famous picture of the Universe as a homeostasis, which as a totality remains unchanged although all its constituent parts incessantly move like pieces in a kaleidoscope.” But it seems to be even more complicated than this, as the homeostasis, for Ilyenkov, is restored through its opposite: a catastrophe of a specific kind that excludes, perhaps, contemplative and untroubled Spinozan views about substance.
In Spinoza, substance, interpreted as matter, possesses at least two attributes: thought and extension. In contrast to this, “vulgar” materialism says that intellect and thought emerge from a dialectical movement of matter, i.e., matter is necessary for the emergence of thought, but never vice versa. In this picture, the existence of thought is contingent, not necessary; it is thus “the product of a fortuitous combination of circumstances,” as Ilyenkov sums up this view. But a subtler materialism would, in a dialectical movement, also claim the converse—that thought is necessary for matter. “Matter cannot exist without thought,” writes Ilyenkov.
At this point in his argument, Ilyenkov lingers over the question of how these assumptions can change our philosophical understanding of thinking itself. According to the general understanding of this question in Soviet diamat, thought is the supreme form of matter’s development. But Ilyenkov is more specific, emphasizing that thought is the final stage of this development. There are no higher forms of matter than thought. Indeed, if higher forms of matter could exist, this would mean that they are inaccessible to thinking, being a kind of Kantian inconceivable “noumenon”; a kind of fideism could be built on these higher forms, pointing to the existence of an unknowable God. For Hegel, notes Ilyenkov, suprahuman Reason is still comprehensible, as it is based on the same logic as the human mind and so is still a form of thought.
Ilyenkov argues that there is only one way of understanding this cosmic “situation”: as a cyclical movement from the lowest forms of matter to the highest (“the thinking brain”) and back, to their decomposition into the lowest forms of matter (biological, chemical, and physical). If we admit the limit of the highest development of matter, writes Ilyenkov, we should also admit its lowest, most primitive level, where matter contains only the simplest qualities. Borrowing ideas from the discipline of physics as it existed at the time (in the 1950s), Ilyenkov associates this lowest form of matter not with particles—atoms, electrons, etc.—but rather with a “field” as the minimal form of the existence of matter.
The idea of the limits of the development of matter (the highest limit and the lowest limit), as well as the assumption that thought is necessarily an attribute of matter (and let the record show that a truly decisive argument for this necessity remains to be discovered), constitute the two main speculative frameworks on which Ilyenkov builds his cosmology, which he reservedly calls a “hypothesis.” The third premise connects the previous two: it is the assumption that this cyclical development of the universe passes through a phase involving the complete destruction of matter—through a galaxy-scale “fire.” This premise reflects both the “spirit” of dialectical negation, known since Heraclitus, as well as theories of the “big bang” and the so-called “thermal death of the universe,” which presumably precedes the final explosion.
This universal destruction will inevitably involve the destruction of humanity, endowed with the faculty of thought. At this point, Ilyenkov’s speculative drive accelerates even more. As we remember, he started from the premise that thought is a necessary attribute of matter. But how is this necessity of thought effectuated? How does it prove itself? Here we enter the proper realm of Ilyenkov’s cosmology. The elements that Ilyenkov introduced at previous points in his argument come together into an astonishing narrative.
As he himself acknowledges, this narrative is a rather “poetic fantasy.” However, he still grounds his argument in the authority of dialectical materialism, mostly referring to Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, which also raised questions about the end of the universe due to its thermal death—definitely not what one expects from the optimistic coauthor of the Communist Manifesto! Engels devotes several pages to the issue of thermal death and suggests that the movement of matter will overcome the entropic threshold in an as-yet-unknown way. Here Engels also discusses the ideas of Rudolf Clausius, a nineteenth-century German physicist and mathematician who was the first to introduce the concept of entropy based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Engels notes that “only a miracle” can neutralize entropy.
What Engels called a “miracle” will, in Ilyenkov’s hypothesis, turn into a gesture of self-destruction on the part of communist reason. When thermal death is imminent, the sun and other stars will gradually cool down. But with scientific-technological progress, argues Ilyenkov, humanity will be able to access a new and more powerful source of energy, as well as the capacity to restructure matter itself. This will lead to humanity’s increasing autonomy from the material conditions of its existence, including from the most fundamental laws, such as the law of the cosmic growth of entropy. However, these new powers will not save humanity from a lethal cosmic standstill: “This turns out to be the absolute boundary in which all conditions under which the thinking spirit can exist, inevitably disappear.” We have arrived at the most striking part of Ilyenkov’s cosmological narrative.
He claims that contemporary science still cannot explain the transition from the thermal death of the universe to the big bang, since the law of entropy only suggests that the collapse of the universe will bring it to a “zero outcome”—absolute homeostasis at the lowest point. The universe needs a special intervention to rechannel the energy that was radiated during the cycle of matter’s development into a new “global fire.” The question of what (or who) sets the universe on fire is crucial. According to Ilyenkov, it is the cosmological function of thought to provide the conditions to “relaunch” the universe, which is collapsing due to thermal death. It is human intelligence which, having achieved the highest potency, has to launch the big bang. This is how thought proves in reality that it is a necessary attribute of matter.
As Ilyenkov writes:
- In concrete terms, one can imagine it like this: At some peak point of their development, thinking beings, executing their cosmological duty and sacrificing themselves, produce a conscious cosmic catastrophe—provoking a process, a reverse “thermal dying” of cosmic matter; that is, provoking a process leading to the rebirth of dying worlds by means of a cosmic cloud of incandescent gas and vapors. In simple terms, thought turns out to be a necessary mediating link, thanks only to which the fiery “rejuvenation” of universal matter becomes possible; it proves to be this direct “efficient cause” that leads to the instant activation of endless reserves of interconnected motion, in a similar manner to how it currently initiates a chain reaction, artificially destroying a small quantity of the core of radioactive material … This being said, thought remains a historically transitional episode in the development of the universe, a derivative (“secondary”) product of the development of matter, but a product that is absolutely necessary: a consequence that simultaneously becomes the condition for the existence of infinite matter.
Especially touching here are phrases like “in concrete terms” or “in simple terms,” which contrast with the universal scale and singularity of the event. After proposing such a mind-blowing hypothesis, Ilyenkov is very careful to repeat that this narrative does not break with any of the principles of dialectical materialism. For Ilyenkov, this science-inspired speculation, based on contemporary physics, also matches with the classic philosophy of Spinoza and his notion of the attribute; an “attribute” designates something that is strictly necessary for the infinite existence of substance (i.e., matter, from a dialectical-materialist point of view). As Ilyenkov notes, if the thinking brain, as the highest form of matter, were only contingent and “useless,” it would be, in Spinoza’s technical language, merely a “mode” (modus) and not an “attribute.”
Ilyenkov’s hypothesis also undermines any religious or idealistic teleology that ascribes to human (or nonhuman) intelligence the goal of self-perfection or absolute knowledge. The real goal, notes Ilyenkov sarcastically, is “endlessly greater” than “those pathetic fantasies.”
Finally, there is one more important point in this narrative, which appears rather marginal in the text but remains crucial for its interpretation.
The political condition that Ilyenkov mentions in his text, as something obvious, is communism, or a “classless society”:
- Millions of years will pass, thousands of generations will be born and go to their graves, a genuine human system will be established on Earth, with the conditions for activity—a classless society, spiritual and material culture will abundantly blossom, with the aid of, and on the basis of, which humankind can only fulfill its great sacrificial duty before nature … For us, for people living at the dawn of human prosperity, the struggle for this future will remain the only real form of service to the highest aims of the thinking spirit."
Review
Alexei Penzin:
"One could say that this text expresses archaic, premodern contents wrapped in the language of classic philosophy, science, and dialectical materialism. The indicator of this mythic content is, especially, the theme of heroic self-sacrifice and “global fire,” a familiar Promethean motif. When I sent this text to Boris Groys, he offered a much more radical reading of its paganism, calling “Cosmology” “a revival of the Aztec religion” of Quetzalcoatl, who “sets himself on fire to reverse the entropic process.” Of course, Ilyenkov would probably have welcomed such a comparison with a healthy dose of good philosophical laughter, provoked, as it is, by the enormous claims of his text which appears, to the contemporary reader, to be a self-deconstructing entity.
However, as we recalled at the outset, Aristotle already noted that the mythical is also philosophical to some degree and in some sense, as it is based on the same effect of astonishment and wonder. To classify the genre and intention of “Cosmology,” one could also mention here the paradoxical idea of the “mythology of reason.” The mythology of reason was one of the themes of the 1796/97 essay The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism, which lacks an author name but was presumably written by a young Hegel, Schelling, or Hölderlin. This “mythology” conveys the emerging contents of German idealism by way of sensory images and narratives that aim to be directly accessible to the masses. Similarly, Ilyenkov’s hypothesis could be called a “communist mythology of reason” that conveys, in a dramatic narrative, the condensed meanings of the communist project.
Another critical and rather reductive way of approaching the text would be to read it as a psychological symptom of its author, given the tragic personal circumstances that led Ilyenkov to commit suicide at the end of the 1970s. This reading would make this text seem like a primordial suicidal fantasy sprinkled with communism and dialectical materialism. It could also be read as a politico-ideological symptom generated by the short-lived gap between the post-Stalinist moment and the disenchantment of late socialism. This gap combined both the optimism of socialist expansion, backed by the real position of the USSR after WWII as a global superpower, and a melancholy at the transience and fragility of “real communism.” We could say that Ilyenkov’s text prefigures the USSR’s future collapse as a cosmic catastrophe.
In a more general way, the text could also be regarded as a condensed symptom of real communism as a philosophically articulated historical totality, if we recall Boris Groys’s seminal book The Communist Postscript; this book presented the USSR as a purely linguistic being, where language, detached from its instrumentalization at the hands of the market, was the sole medium of society, expanding the “forces of the paradox” to a cosmic scale—an expansion which is vividly expressed in Ilyenkov’s text. The visionary narrative of the future cosmic catastrophe and self-extinction of communist humanity can also be linked to the theory that—against “sweet” and idealizing utopian representations—endows real communism with the force of radical negativity that is also expressed in “Cosmology.”
A subtle and important aspect of Ilyenkov’s argument is that the singular event of relaunching the universe through the action of a superintelligence depends on the realization of communism. Otherwise, the unfolding of all scientific and technical powers of thought will be blocked and suppressed by the narrow interest of a capitalist system operating in stubborn disregard for the fortunes of the universe, which it subordinates to short-term profit. Against the backdrop of contemporary debates on the so-called “Anthropocene,” this part of Ilyenkov’s argument is especially relevant. In contrast to Ilyenkov and other Soviet thinkers and writers of the 1950s, the Anthropocene theorists seem to claim the opposite—i.e., that life itself generates the entropic process, which destroys the planet precisely when it achieves human and intelligent form. But this interpretation is only possible because of the contemporary eclipse of past historical opportunities (together with such texts as “Cosmology”). The crucial condition of the anti-entropic process, according to Ilyenkov, is not only the biologically and intellectually enabled self-organization of matter, but also the “real movement” of communism. Thus “Cosmology,” pointing out the missed opportunity of communism, works well with the left critique of the Anthropocene which argues that this notion rather masks a “Capitalocene,” the destructive and toxic effects of full capitalist domination itself and not of abstract thinking life or humanity.
A late-Foucauldian interpretation is also possible here. It would similarly link the text to the totality of real communism, presenting it as an “exercise” in building the communist subject, which this text expresses and performs. Indeed, as noted by Foucault and such scholars as Pierre Hadot, the physics and material ontology of the universe can have a strictly ethical and political function. For example, the Stoics regarded physics and cosmology as more than just forms of knowledge or discourse; they were also a meditative exercise, a practice that detached the subject from his or her immediate narrow environment and allowed them to ascend to the contemplation of the whole world. This contemplative ascension presents everyday passions and affects as insignificant, compared to the greatness of celestial bodies; one of the frequent topics of such meditations was the imagining of a global catastrophe—in order to strengthen the subject’s capacity for self-mastery in extreme conditions.
Ilyenkov’s text is indeed just such an exercise. If it had been published and used in Soviet times, it could definitely have had a mobilizing effect—as a paradoxical meditation on the transience of all things in the world, including the most valuable things, such as communism and the very existence of humanity. Even after the collapse of real communism, when the contemporary political subject is plunged into a miserable combination of neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neo-nationalism (not to say neofascism), this text is able to produce both a calming and an invigorating effect."
Discussion 1: Relational Philosophy
Filosofia:
"Ilyenkov’s most important early text is the phantasmagoric “Cosmology of the Spirit.” He read it to friends and visitors in his apartment over decades. Drawing on Friedrich Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, Ilyenkov’s text plays with ideas of intelligent materialism and humanity’s self-destruction. Through communism, thinking materially manifests itself as a cosmic event—a crucial stage in the circular evolution of the solar system. Ultimately, an excess of energy leads to the universe’s thermal death. To defy the fatal law of entropy, humanity commits a collective suicide, “a gesture of self-destruction on the part of communist reason” (Penzin). This bizarre vision rests upon a new reading of dialectical materialism that argues that matter cannot exist without thinking.
In different places of the universe, matter becomes conscious. Thinking is the “highest flower” of matter (Ilyenkov, “Cosmology of the Spirit” 184). The “thinking brain appears as one of the necessary links, locking together the universal [vseobshchee] big circle of universal [mirovoi] matter” (170). Ilyenkov’s text incorporates scientific theories and innovations, such as thermodynamics, the Soviet space program, or the construction of the first nuclear power plant near Moscow in 1954. One subtext is Russian Cosmism, as represented by Nikolai Fedorov and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Ilyenkov drew on ideas of his friends: Pobisk Kuznetsov’s theory of the origin of life (Mareev, E. V. Il’enkov: zhit’ filosofieii 157) and Igor Zabelin’s sci-fi notion of the “anti-entropic function of life” (Penzin). Arguably, “Cosmology” also engaged with Soviet ecology, Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere in particular (Jacobs).
Ilyenkov’s opaque “Cosmology” has been variously interpreted: as “a revival of the Aztec religion of Quetzalcoatl” (Groys, cited in Penzin); a Marxist apocalypse in which reason tragically repays its debt to Mother Nature (Vivaldi 195); a dystopian vision of life as “a sailor who climbs the mast of a ship that is sinking” (Mareev, E. V. Il’enkov: zhit’ filosofieii 257); an “exercise in communist subjectivity” (Penzin); and as “a symptom of a fatal flaw in the entire project of Western Marxism” (Žižek). For thinking is “an infinite substance of the universe,” and the death of thinking matter in the universe is nothing but a release of energy that initiates a new cosmic cycle (Ilyenkov, “Cosmology of the Spirit” 190)."
(https://filosofia.dickinson.edu/encyclopedia/ilyenkov-evald/)
Ilyenkov's work on Ideality
Filosofia:
" Like the concrete, the ideal does not exist in the head but outside the subject. The ideal is a stamp pressed on nature by human activity. Ilyenkov’s seminal “The Ideal” (“Ideal’noe”), published in 1962 in the five-volume Philosophical Encyclopedia (Filosofskaia Entsiklopediia), explored non-material entities in a material reality.
The ideal resides at the threshold of mind and social activity. It “is not a thing, but part of a process that involves the human representation of things in the body of other things” (Levant 8). Ilyenkov’s ideality (ideal’nost’) is a category to study how thinking is embodied in forms of collective activity. Thinking is shaped by ideals, similar to the form of a jar growing under the hands of a potter (Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic). The ideal is situated neither in the piece of clay nor the body of the potter. It arises from the activity of transforming the clay into a jar. Thinking happens within the interactivity of hands, clay, and tools. Such a conception of a transindividual thinking body transcends any material-social or mind-world dualism.
Written in the mid-1970s and published posthumously, “Dialectics of the Ideal” (“Dialektika ideal’nogo”) built on such a concept of ideality, to defy both empiricism and subjective idealism. Neither mental states nor things, ideals are the reflection of things in other things; they play an active part in social reality. Rather than mental images within an individual mind, ideals are universal forms in a shared, transindividual reality. As already sketched out in “Cosmology,” ideas are a precondition of materiality; in other words, matter thinks and ideas matter."
(https://filosofia.dickinson.edu/encyclopedia/ilyenkov-evald/)
Thinking as a Process of Communion: the vision of a collective thinking body
Filosofia:
On the "The “Zagorsk Experiment”:
"In the 1970s, Ilyenkov devoted much time to Alexander Meshcheriakov’s radical school in Zagorsk near Moscow, a laboratory for new methods in deaf-blind education [surdotiflopedagogika]. In the footsteps of Soviet psychologists, such as Lev Vygotsky, Meshcheriakov confronted in practice how Diamat excluded deaf-blind children from socialist society. Despite its radically participatory and anti-ableist vision, the “Zagorsk Experiment” was not uncontroversial (Pushchaev). Meshcheriakov believed that deaf-blind children excelled in embodying comradeship rather than being impediments to socialist society. After Meshcheriakov’s death in 1974, Ilyenkov continued his legacy.
One role of the pedagogues in Zagorsk was to explore bodily movements and gestures together, for instance holding a spoon in one hand and guiding it to the mouth (Almborg). Gradually, through shared embodied activity, the children learned how to eat, dress, smile, and finally speak through their hands and with the help of a teletaktor, a machine that converts sound into vibration. Many of Ilyenkov’s students learned foreign languages and later enrolled at the Faculty of Psychology at Moscow University—proof of the success of his method. As an educator, Ilyenkov did not teach his students what but how to think, enabling them to flourish as a whole person embedded in their community.
In the “Zagorsk Experiment” the very nature of human thinking was at stake. Where did the mind come from in subjects bereft of essential senses such as seeing and hearing? For Ilyenkov, deaf-blind children were living proof that human consciousness was born from social interactions alone. The human mind was conditioned by the objects surrounding it, themselves created by humans, such as spoons, towels, tables, or chairs. The brain is shaped into an organ of thinking by the child’s interaction with these things and with other human beings. The intellectual abilities deaf-blind people laboriously acquired in Zagorsk were, for Ilyenkov, proof for the social rootedness of thinking. Language, too, does not arise from an individual mind but manifests itself through a complex system of communal activity, i.e. culture. In his essay “Where Does the Mind Come From?” (“Otkuda beretsia um?”), Ilyenkov recalled how one of his students, Aleksander Suvorov, was asked the following question after giving a speech:
Your case contradicts the old premise of materialism, according to which all that gets into the mind is necessarily developed and provided by the senses. If your senses are damaged, if you cannot hear or see, how could your mind develop?” The question was transmitted to Suvorov via tactile alphabet, and he answered into the microphone: “and why do you think that we do not hear and see? We are not blind and deaf, we see and hear by the eyes of all our friends, all people, all humankind. (Cited in Chukhrov 70)
The aim was therefore not only to enable deaf-blind children to lead a more independent life. Rather, Meshcheriakov envisioned to turn them into members of a society that they communally co-created. Enriched by his work in Zagorsk, Ilyenkov’s conscious materialism radically diverged from Western metaphysics and its fetishization of the individual. For Ilyenkov, thinking is a process of communion [obshchenie]; we can only see the world through the eyes of all people.
..
This vision of a collective thinking body drew on Spinoza, Ilyenkov’s favorite philosopher and “alter-ego” (Maidansky, “Reality of the Ideal” 141). Fragments from his unfinished book project on Spinoza were published in 1987, on the occasion of Spinoza’s 350th anniversary (Mareev, Vstrecha s E. Il’enkovym 70). Among other seventeenth-century thinkers, Spinoza occupied a special place already in Ilyenkov’s first book on Marx’s Capital. His dialectics of the ideal likewise relied on a “Spinozist understanding of the human soul as an idea of the human body” (73). Finally, a whole chapter in Dialectical Logic was dedicated to Spinoza, which explores thinking as an attribute of substance. Beginning with “Cosmology,” Spinoza’s somatic monism has been crucial to Ilyenkov’s post-Cartesian theory of thinking as an expression of collective, self-conscious activity.
Like Spinoza, Ilyenkov considered the interaction between body and mind as an objective motion in the world. However, the idea of a thinking body is nowhere to be found in Spinoza. It was Ilyenkov’s own appropriation of Spinoza’s “res cogitans, the ‘thinking thing’” (Maidansky, “Spinoza in Late‐Soviet Philosophy” 336). For Ilyenkov, cognition is both sensuous and ideal; it is the dynamic life-activity of bodies. Thinking manifests itself in “the entire ‘non-organic human body’ that stands objectively over and against an individual human being, the body of civilization, including tools and temples, statues and offices, factories and political organizations, ships and toys—all that with which we are involved from the moment we are born and enter the human family” (Ilyenkov, Intelligent Materialism 13).
Body and mind, the “two Cartesian halves” (Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic), are united in the thinking body, which thinks by molding its own form to shape other bodies. Deaf-blind children, as an example, recreate images of what they “see” through their hands. After walking through a ravine, a deaf-blind girl built a model: she “repeated the spatial contour of the ravine with her body movements and then reproduced it as a plasticine figure” (Maidansky, “Spinoza in Late‐Soviet Philosophy” 339). Her hands and brain only “think” when they are transformed into organs of humanity’s inorganic body. Like blood, thoughts circulate through society’s cells and vessels. Thus, it is not the individual mind that thinks but culture itself.
...
In Ilyenkov’s last, unpublished text, “What is Personality?” (“Chto zhe takoe lichnost’?”), which describes the communist subject as multilayered and interconnected. In his writings on the ideal, Ilyenkov insisted that the essence of the human being is not “inside”; a person is formed through collective activity and social ties. Human personality is always “outside” of itself, embodying its essence in relation to others. A communist person is a collective thinking body, entwining the subject with its environment and the Other:
Personality (lichnost’) not only exists, but is born for the first time as a “knot” (uzelok), tied in a network of mutual relations that arise between individuals in the process of collective activity (labor) [. . .]. Personality is the totality of a person’s relations to themselves as to some “other” —the relation of the “I” to itself as to some “non-I.” Therefore, its “body” is not a separate body of the species “Homo sapiens,” but at least two such bodies — “I” and “you,” merged as if they were in one body of social and human ties, relations, interrelations. (“Chto zhe takoe lichnost’?” 393f.)
Personality is the collective interactivity of becoming ourselves as another."
(https://filosofia.dickinson.edu/encyclopedia/ilyenkov-evald/)
Discussion 2: Cosmic Philosophy
Ilyenkov's Critique of Cybernetics
Filosofia:
"Written for a general public, the fantasy book On Idols and Ideals (Ob idolakh i idealakh, 1968) defies hopes to solve problems within Soviet socialism by way of self-governing systems and technology. Cybernetic visions of the mind as machine are at odds with Ilyenkov’s theory of the thinking body. Ilyenkov considered cybernetics a false science that had regressed to pre-Marxist materialism. He strongly opposed the idea that thinking machines could be more intelligent than humans. For Ilyenkov, no computer can think dialectically; it can solve problems but not sublate contradictions. A truly philosophical question, only resolvable through further study, always appears as a paradox.
...
While he opened a door to non-human consciousness, Ilyenkov ultimately defended the specific abilities of the human mind. Thinking cannot be simulated by machines or grasped by measuring brain waves. We think through many organs: our hands, tools, friends. Idols have to be discarded and ideals brought down from heaven to earth."
(https://filosofia.dickinson.edu/encyclopedia/ilyenkov-evald/)
On the Anti-Entropic Function of Life
On the context of other Russian discussions leading to Ilyenkov's text.
Alexei Penzin:
"Regarding the immediate circumstances surrounding the writing of “Cosmology,” intellectual historians and biographers emphasize the influence of one of Ilyenkov’s most important friends in the 1950s, the scientist and self-taught speculative thinker Pobisk Kuznetsov (1924–2000). Everything about Kuznetsov was peculiar, starting with his first name: “Pobisk” is not a typical Russian name, but an acronym of the sentence “[P]okolenie [O]ktyabrskikh [B]ortsov [I] [S]troitelei [K]ommunizma,” i.e., “A Generation of the October Revolution Fighters and Builders of Communism.” Kuznetsov was an interdisciplinary scholar with a wide range of interests—from biology, chemistry, and physics to engineering, economics, and systems theory. He also spent time in a labor camp late in Stalin’s regime for organizing an unsanctioned discussion group where students addressed an ambitious question at the intersection of evolutionary biology and philosophy: What is the function or goal of life at the scale of the universe? In the course of his talks with Kuznetsov, Ilyenkov convinced him to write the entry on “Life” for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy that Ilyenkov coedited in the 1950s and ’60s.
Kuznetsov considered the function of life to be “anti-entropic.” Life brings higher forms of organization, creating an order from “chaos.” Entropy is a measure of the dispersal of energy; the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in closed systems, entropy can only increase, which eventually leads to a final dispersal of energy and ultimately the “death” of the system. Accordingly, “anti-entropic” refers to the capacity of some forms of matter (such as life) to counterbalance the increase of entropy. In the 1950s, Kuznetsov also wrote about the problem of the “thermal death of the universe”—its entropic collapse—with reference to Engels’s discussion of this question in his Dialectics of Nature. He also linked the “thermal death” problem to the anti-entropic function of life, hinting at a possible way out of this predicament.
Kuznetsov was not alone in generating ideas about the anti-entropic function of life. His work was part of a broader Soviet debate in the 1950s and ’60s about the meaning and final goal of both humanity and communism in the universe. Participants in this debate were aware that similar questions had been discussed in texts by earlier cosmists, albeit without much reference to the communist horizon. For example, another friend of Ilyenkov, the sci-fi writer and scientist Igor Zabelin, expressed similar views about the anti-entropic function of life in his book Chelovek i chelovechestvo: Etjudy Optimisma (The Human and humanity: Optimistic essays), published in 1970."
Ilyenkov’s cosmic expansion of consciousness
Isabel Jacobs:
" In his 1968 sci-fi parable On Idols and Ideals (Об идолах и идеалах), Ilyenkov developed a new theory of thinking as the result of collective activity. On his journeys through the cosmic biosphere, the new Soviet man would potentially encounter intelligent extraterrestrial comrades:
In the age of cosmonauts [. . .], couldn’t a highly organized and thinking being not have some kind of physical appearance completely unexpected by you? Why couldn’t it look like an octopus, a mushroom, an ocean, like a mold spread out over the stones of some far-off planet? Must it have a nose and two eyes?
In the fantastic stories that follow, we meet non-human thinking machines, including a brain on spider legs, a lazy flying saucer, a deaf ear, a brainless set of hands and a sticky film of mold. In their communist gatherings, the machines celebrate the overcoming of the human. In this post-humanist thought experiment, the very concept of thinking becomes unstable. Can those vegetables think? And do machines think? Can they be comrades?
For Ilyenkov, thinking is not reducible to science; we cannot grasp it by measuring brain waves. We think through many organs, including our bodies, hands, tools and friends. Ilyenkov’s sharp critique of cybernetics and technocratic capitalism gains new relevance in contemporary debates on artificial intelligence. While opening a door to non-human thinking, Ilyenkov ultimately defends the specific capacities of the human mind. Communism, Ilyenkov’s book concludes, “is not a fairy tale about some bright future, but a real movement of modernity.”
...
Collective thinking cannot be grasped by vulgar materialism; it is shaped by what Ilyenkov calls ideals. Ilyenkov compares the ideal to “the form of a jar growing under the hands of a potter.” This ideal is situated neither in the piece of clay nor the body of the potter. It arises from the activity of transforming the clay into a jar. Thinking does not occur “inside the head”—but through the interrelations of the hands, the clay, and the tools. Ilyenkov’s conception of transindividual thinking breaks up the divide between material and social.
Accordingly, we do not see through our eyes but with a thinking body that is the totality of social activity. Ideals are “transplanted” into our bodies not through our senses but our interrelations. In the words of one of Ilyenkov’s students:
And why do you think that we do not hear and see? We are not blind and deaf, we see and hear through the eyes of all our friends, all people, all humankind (quoted after Chukhrov).
Ilyenkov was interested in processes of what he called, following the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, ingrowing (вращивание), that is, the becoming of personality by internalizing social activity. In various places, Ilyenkov described thinking as “trans-plantation”—literally becoming a plant. We find similar ideas in contemporary plant philosophy, for instance, in Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013):
The human who thinks like a plant becomes a plant [. . .]. Let us then try to get accustomed to the idea that [. . .] “non-identical thinking” indicates freedom from the substantive and self-enclosed identity of the thinkers themselves.
In Zagorsk, Ilyenkov nurtured a new type of human personality rooted in one communal thinking body. The subject who thinks here, like the plant, is always an Other, always non-identical. Plant-thinking does not ask the question of who thinks but understands thinking as inseparable from and embedded in the environment.
In Russian, the word “plants” (растения) derives from the same root like the verb “to grow” (расти)—it is a mobile, dynamic thinking being who embodies movement, temporality, becoming, and metamorphosis—whereas the English “plant” suggests a being that is fixed in the ground and rooted in one place.
In his final text “What is Personality?” (Что же такое личность?), written shortly before his death, Ilyenkov explores the possibilities of an ecology of relationships, to use a term by Philippe Descola. Here, Ilyenkov further develops his theory of collective thinking bodies:
Personality (личность) is born as a “node,” emerging from a network of mutual relations which arise between individuals in the process of collective activity (labor) [. . .]. The personality is the totality of human relations to itself as to some “other”— the relation of the self to itself as to some “non-self.” Therefore, its “body” is not a separate body of the «homo sapiens» species, but, at a minimum, two such bodies—“I” and “you,” merged as if they were in one body of social and human ties, relations, interrelations.
For Ilyenkov, personhood arises from communion (общение), both with others and the environment. Personality is collective, cosmic interactivity, a continuous process of becoming someone other than who we are."
(https://www.jhiblog.org/2023/11/20/evald-ilyenkovs-ecology-of-personality/)
On the Necessary Role of Communism in Cosmic History
Slavoj Zizek:
"cosmological necessity and the role of Communism"
"For him, such a radical self-sacrifice can be performed only by a highly developed Communist society:
- “Millions of years will pass, thousands of generations will be born and go to their graves, a genuine human system will be established on Earth, with the conditions for activity—a classless society, spiritual and material culture will abundantly blossom, with the aid of, and on the basis of, which humankind can only fulfill its great sacrificial duty before nature … For us, for people living at the dawn of human prosperity, the struggle for this future will remain the only real form of service to the highest aims of the thinking spirit.”
So the ultimate justification of Communism is that, by way of bringing about a solidary society free of egotist instincts, it will have enough ethical strength to perform the highest self-sacrifice of humanity in its self-destruction and the simultaneous destruction of the entire cosmos:
- “if humanity is unable to achieve communism, then collective human intelligence will not achieve its highest stage of power either, as it will be undermined by the capitalist system, which is as far as one can get from any self-sacrificial or otherwise sublime motivation.”
Excerpt
Evald Ilyenkov:
"“In concrete terms, one can imagine it like this: At some peak point of their development, thinking beings, executing their cosmological duty and sacrificing themselves, produce a conscious cosmic catastrophe—provoking a process, a reverse ‘thermal dying’ of cosmic matter; that is, provoking a process leading to the rebirth of dying worlds by means of a cosmic cloud of incandescent gas and vapors. In simple terms, thought turns out to be a necessary mediating link, thanks only to which the fiery ‘rejuvenation’ of universal matter becomes possible; it proves to be this direct ‘efficient cause’ that leads to the instant activation of endless reserves of interconnected motion.”
More information
- Bibliography of Ilyenkov: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/
Articles
- Alexei Penzin, “Contingency and Necessity in Evald Ilyenkov’s Communist Cosmology,” available online at https://www.e-flux.com/journal/88/174178/contingency-and-necessity-in-evald-ilyenkov-s-communist-cosmology/. (
* Article: Cosmology of Mind. By Sergei Mareyev. Studies in East European Thought 57 (3-4):249-259 (2005)
URL = https://philpapers.org/rec/MARCOM-5
"In Il’enkov’s “Cosmology of mind,” written in his younger days in the tradition of Spinoza and Engels, the thinking mind appears as a necessary attribute of matter. Like all other main forms of matter in motion, the mind has its cosmic purpose and predestination. Il’enkov argued that it has to close the beginning and the end of the Big Cycle in order to return the dying Universe to its fiery youth. Il’enkov believed that this is the sole way to save the Universe from “thermal death” following the inevitable increase in entropy."
- Lotz, C., Potapov, K. & Nowak, A.W. 100 years of Evald Ilyenkov. Stud East Eur Thought 76, 347–350 (2024). doi
URL = https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11212-024-09653-2
"This special issue commemorates the centenary of Evald Ilyenkov (1924-1979), a prominent Soviet philosopher whose work has gained increasing recognition in international circles beyond the post-Soviet context in recent years."
Books
- Bakhurst, David. Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
- The Heart of the Matter: Ilyenkov, Vygotsky and the Courage of Thought. Leiden: Brill: 2023.
* Finding Evald Iyenkov. by Corinna Lotz. Lupus Books: London, 2019.
URL = https://ilyenkovfriends.org/2019/04/13/how-evald-ilyenkov-was-found/ review
"Through the cameo stories of leading Ilyenkov scholars, Finding Evald Ilyenkov traces how academics, researchers and practitioners in the UK, Denmark, Finland, Canada and Russia were drawn to his work. Written in an accessible style it introduces an uncompromising thinker to new generations."