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/)