Thinking as a Process of Communion

Discussion

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.

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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.

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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/)