Evald Ilyenkov on the Cosmology of the Spirit

Discussion

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:

"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/)

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/)

More information

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.