E.V. Ilyenkov against Positivism

Abstract

Based on the material of E.V. Ilyenkov’s latest monograph “Lenin’s Dialectics and Metaphysics of Positivism (Reflections on V.I. Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirioсriticism)”, the authors of the article explore his struggle against neo-positivism. The first part of the article reveals the real reason from the authors’ point of view for the steady popularity of Bacon and Locke’s empiricism as a philosophical prerequisite for any positivism among representatives of the scien­tific and technical intelligentsia. Its reason lies in the reliance of the subject of empirical cognition on sensory perceptions, which establish the connection of human consciousness with the outside world, although they do not yet sepa­rate random and necessary definitions of perceived things from each other, which falls to the lot of abstract thinking. In the second part of the article, it is proved that Ilyenkov, like Lenin, failed to convince his opponents because the polemic of Marxism with positivism was conducted within the limits of an unresolved contradiction between philosophy and experience. The conclusion of the article fixes the need for a dialectical step towards a completely reasonable resolution of the contradiction between philosophy and experience, which was made by E.V. Ilyenkov – an outstanding thinker of the Soviet era.