On the Dialectic of the Real and the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and the Russian Epistemological Tradition

Abstract

The article is devoted to rethinking the place and role of Evald Vasilyevich Ilyen­kov in the Russian epistemological tradition. His interpretation of the dialectic of the real and the ideal (in German: Ideelle) turns out to be strikingly consonant with the intellectual searches of Russian philosophers of the first half of the twen­tieth century (G.G. Shpet, P.A. Florensky, M.M. Bakhtin, A.F. Losev, etc.), who turned (each in their own way) to understanding the phenomena of the social world. This consonance for a long time remained outside the scope of research attention, and meanwhile, immersing the concept of Ilyenkov’s “ideal” in the con­text of “positive philosophy” on Russian soil becomes relevant today for identi­fying continuity in the development of Russian philosophy as an integral cultural and historical phenomenon. Despite the apparent paradox, Ilyenkov, postulating the “ideal” as “really” existing, turns out to be much closer to the Russian philo­sophical tradition than the certain “socio-ideological” conjuncture of his time al­lowed to imagine. Exploring the “logic” of Marx’s “Capital”, Ilyenkov discovers a special layer of reality that exists exclusively in the social world and requires understanding. He became the first in Soviet philosophy who not only under­stood the concept of the “ideal” Marx, but also developed it, i.e. revealed the ex­istence of the ideal in the sense of Ideelle not only in the external body of cul­ture, which is the merit of K. Marx, but also in the inner spiritual world of man. In conclusion, the need to specify the concept of E.V. Ilyenkov is noted by com­paring it with the ideas of Russian philosophers, in particular with the reasoning of M.M. Bakhtin about the relationship between architectonic and compositional forms, content and matter (material).