Soviet philosophy: Ewald Iljenkow: Who thinks abstractly?

Ewald Wassiljewitsch Ilyenkov would have been 100 years old on February 18th; 45 years ago today he murdered himself. His daughter, the journalist Jelena Illesch, described her father’s “philosophical loneliness” at the end of his life in an article. While he was still arguing against the stagnation of official interpretations of Marxist theory, more and more friends who had become dissidents turned away from him and his Marxism in order to embrace the ideology of the West without resistance.

In those years, Ilyenkov drank, often together with his friend, the pretty universal scientist Pobisk Kuznetsov, who lived until the year 2000 and of whom there is a YouTube video from the 90s in which he explained Hegel’s dialectic with a » Slinky” (also called stair runner) compares.

Both Kuznetsov and Ilyenkov, as well as Ilyenkov’s father, the war correspondent and writer Vasily Pavlovich Ilyenkov, were Red Army soldiers at the front in the Second World War. Ewald experienced the end of the war as a 21-year-old in Berlin, where he placed flowers on Hegel’s grave. He liked the music of Richard Wagner, which, according to his relatives, he brought home from Germany.

Ilyenkov seems to have taken on apocalyptic moods in a variety of forms. The text “Cosmology of Spirit” comes from his time as an aspirant: a scientifically sophisticated essay about the cosmic mission of thinking, which, as an innate property of matter, is supposed to drive humanity to collective suicide by virtue of its reason. In this way, the inexorably extinguishing life of matter would be reanimated – with the help of a necessary burst of energy released by suicide. To this text we owe the only text about Ilyenkov published in the West these days by Slavoj Žižek: “Ilyenkov’s Cosmology: The Point of Madness of Dialectical Materialism”.

Ilyenkov’s best-known book in German-speaking countries was translated into German in the Soviet Union and was published in 1979 by the Progress publishing house in Moscow with the title “The Dialectic of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s ‘Capital’.”

Returning home from the front to the Soviet Union, the student Ilyenkov turned to Georg Lukács with a translation question while he was reading his book “The Young Hegel” with fellow students. translated into Russian. Lukács then introduced Ilyenkov to Mikhail Lifschitz, to whom Lukács in turn had dedicated his “Young Hegel”. Ilyenkov and Mikhail Lifschitz became friends.

In the online archive of the Russian artist Dmitri Gutov dedicated to Mikhail Lifschitz, there are texts by Lifschitz about his theoretical discussions with Ilyenkov and Lukács, accessible to everyone, but only in Russian. The twelve volumes of a complete edition of Ilyenkov’s work are currently being published by the Russian Academy of Sciences, of which six volumes have already been published – available for loan in Russian from the Berlin State Library. Sergei Mareev, a student of Ilyenkov, writes in his book, “From the History of Soviet Philosophy: Lukács – Vygotsky – Ilyenkov.”, the three authors as a line within Soviet philosophy that was not able to establish itself as a methodological principle there.

Dialectical materialism, which Ilyenkov revealed as the epistemological approach through which it is only possible to discover what is under one’s nose, could be contrasted with Mark Fisher’s perspective. The cultural theorist argued that today we cannot even imagine anything other than what we have in front of our own noses.