Discoveries of Evald Ilyenkov’s Home Archive

Abstract

The article is a study of Ilyenkov’s archival papers published in his Collected Works. In the drafts of his dissertation (1950–1953), Marx’s Paris manuscripts of 1844, at that time published only in German, were discussed for the first time in Russian philosophy. Ilyenkov focuses on the concepts of “contemplation” and human subjectivity as a form of “practical-spiritual mastery of the world” (the term of the mature Marx). The distinction between practical and contempla­tive materialism is clarified. Ilyenkov seeks to understand human subjectivity as a one-sided and fragmentary expression of the essence of the thing in relation to the social man, in the form in which it appears within in the process of practi­cal transformation of the world. The archive contains a detailed commentary on Hegel’s “Philosophy of Spirit”, where Ilyenkov for the first time addresses the theme of personality. In the surviving outline of a lecture from the mid-1950s, the problem of the function of logical categories and language in the ac­tivity of human consciousness is raised. Ilyenkov’s views sharply diverge from the official “theory of reflection” and “Pavlovian psychology”, but they are close to L.S. Vygotsky’s “historical psychology”, which was forbidden in those years. Archival texts from the 1960s shed light on Ilyenkov’s sharply critical attitude to the Soviet model of socialism, in which he saw an ugly implementation of the dream of a “machine smarter than man”. The philosopher considered the state to be “the most malignant and inhuman” of all man-made machines. In conclusion, basing on the transcripts of Merab Mamardashvili’s dissertation, their polemical dialogue with Ilyenkov on the nature of consciousness and forms of cognition is reconstructed.