My first encounter with Ilyenkov’s work was as a second year philosophy

student at the University of Havana, thanks to the inspiring lectures of Dr.

Rubén Zardoya. When I read Ilyenkov’s Dialectical Logic for the first time, I
felt both excited and ambivalent. On the one hand, I was enchanted by the
clarity and depth of his arguments; on the other, I felt a sort of intellectual
envy: at the turn of each page, I had the feeling that these were the same
ideas that I had, only I was unable to express them in such a clear and
profound way, almost as if Ilyenkov had robbed me the chance to write those
ideas by myself. This was, of course, a naïve impression of an undergraduate
under the influence of Ilyenkov’s style of exposition. Ilyenkov’s texts are like
journeys in which the reader is encouraged to walk by his own efforts from
the initial difficulty, through the correct statement of the problem and finally
towards its theoretical resolution; this expository strategy contributes to the
remarkable clarity with which the most profound topics are treated in
Ilyenkov’s works and may incite in the reader the over-confident belief that
he could have walked that path without any guidance. However, even now,
although I realize that, I still feel the same way each time I read Ilyenkov.
Today, I want to share with you some quick thoughts about one of the most
common issues that readers face when they encounter his work, that is, the
difficulty of determining what kind of philosopher Ilyenkov is. How could we
classify him? He is, of course, a Marxist; but where does he stand within the
many currents of Marxism? This is indeed a problematic question. Many
contemporary scholars think that Ilyenkov represents a humanist reaction to
vulgar materialism and the naïve scienticism that dominated most of the
Soviet philosophy of his time. You could find that view even in the abstract
written on the flyer for this very panel of discussion. There is a lot of truth in
it. However, I just want to point out that his theory also rejects the romantic
humanism that prevailed in Western Marxism; for example, Ilyenkov’s theory
is incompatible with the anti-Engelsim (the rejection of the Dialectics of
Nature) of such tradition. So, in my opinion, —and this is precisely why he is
so difficult to classify— Ilyenkov was fighting in two battlefronts: against both
extremes of abstract determinism and abstract humanism.
First of all, leaving aside Ilyenkov’s undeniable hostility toward the official
version of Soviet Marxism, I think that it would be incorrect to present him
completely outside of this trend. Not only did Ilyenkov accept and use most
of the terminology of dialectical materialism, but also he moved within the
coordinates of its problems. Ilyenkov truly is the peak that Soviet philosophy
did not overcome. However, in my opinion, treating Ilyenkov as an “outsider”
to the tradition of thought from which he speaks, makes us unable to
understand the roots, nature, and reach of his ideas. What makes Ilyenkov
so unique —let’s say an ‘orthodox heretic’ as some have called him 1— within
the Soviet tradition is his original theory on the ideal. But even within this
theory, the aforementioned two-battlefronts struggle takes place.
When Ilyenkov treats the problem of the place of the ideal within nature, he
starts from Engels’ Spinozist insight in Dialectics of Nature2 that thought is
not a purely accidental (expendable) phenomenon, but a necessary attribute
of nature; and since nature, that is, matter considered as a whole, never
loses any of its attributes through its historical changes, “one can state that
matter constantly possesses thought, constantly thinks itself.”3
Ilyenkov, following Engels, opposes this view to the ‘mechanistic
materialism’ that deals with the problem of the ideal by simply identifying
thought with the material (physiological) processes occurring inside our
heads. Ilyenkov rightfully rejects this mechanistic view, for the ideal —here
lies the truth of objective idealism— confronts the individual as a fully
objective system of representations (i.e., external to the individual and
internally organized in itself) that forges our ‘heads’ (our subjective human
capacities) and not the other way around. For the individual, even provided
with a perfectly healthy brain and sensory-motor organs, is incapable of
engaging with these ideal forms by himself (i.e., in direct contact with extra-
human nature). Here Ilyenkov is also developing Engels’ insights of the non-
reducibility of thought to simpler forms of movement 4 and that “is precisely
in the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the
most essential and immediate basis of human thought.”5
This takes us to the centrality of the concept of labour (the teleological and
socially mediated alteration of nature) in Ilyenkov’s conception on the ideal.
Some scholars, e.g. Sergei Mareev and Alex Levant, present the young
Lukács (i.e., the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness) as a ‘precursor’
of Ilyenkov’s theory.6 That view, in my opinion, is mistaken. As Lukács
himself years later (at the 60s) recognized, his attempt in his work form the
20s to explain ideological phenomena from the historical materialist
perspective is “narrowed down because its basic Marxist category, labour as
the mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is
missing,”7 While for Ilyenkov, who is here again following Engels 8, labour is
the crucial concept of the Marxist explanation of human thought. For him,
1 See Oittinen 2005, p. 223.
2 See Engels 1987b, pp. 331-335.
3 Ilyenkov 2017, p. 165; see also Ilyenkov 2009, pp. 18-20.
4 “One day we shall certainly ‘reduce’ thought experimentally to molecular and chemical
motion in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?” (Engels 1987b, p. 527).
5 Engels 1987b, p. 511, his emphasis. Cf. Ilyenkov 2009, p. 165.
6 See Levant 2014, p. 15
7 Lukács 1971, p. xvii.
8 See Engels 1987b, pp. 562-564. See, also, Piedra Arencibia 2018.
the ideal always exists objectively in the same reality as material objects as
the form given to them by human labour, and, at the same time,
subjectively, as the form of the thing outside the thing, that is, in the forms
of vital human activity.
This is why Ilyenkov openly rejects the neo-Kantian belief (typical of Wester
Marxism9) that presents social mediated activity as a sort of cultural cage,
that prevents us from knowing how nature is in itself. For Ilyenkov, on the
contrary, “only the same activity as transformed (altered and occasionally
distorted) the ‘true image’ of nature, could indicate what it was like before
and without ‘subjective distortions’.”10 For what is always represented in the
ideal form given to a material object by labour is the universal nature of
another material thing. In other words, Ilyenkov’s conception of the ideality
as a relation between material objects in which one is transformed by human
practice into an objective representation of another’s essence, presupposes
both Engels’ principle of the material unity of the world 11, and the
immanentist notion that natural objects, by themselves, have a concrete
“not-yet-thought” internal structure12 that ideal objects may represent.
Ilyenkov’s theory is, therefore, incompatible with the idealistic “over-
extension of the concept of praxis”13 according to which the “objective world
is no mere in-itself to be reflected, but largely a social product, […] reality is
produced by men and hence can be changed by them.” 14 On the contrary,
Ilyenkov clearly thinks that human labour “includes all other forms and types
of the movement of matter as its abstract moments, and takes place in
conformity with their laws. The general laws governing man’s changing of
nature therefore are also general laws of the change of nature itself,
revealed by man’s activity, and not by orders foreign to it, dictated from
outside.”15 Therefore, the ideal (social) reproduction of nature presupposes
the existence of objective forms of relations and development, laws of
motion that are not imposed on nature but reflected from it by practical
activity; those natural laws constitute the basis of our (successful)
transformation of nature according to a conscious plan and not the other way

9 See, e.g., Schmidt 1971 p. 60.

10 Ilyenkov 2009, p. 150.
11 “From the perspective of coherent materialism, there can be nothing other than matter in
motion that is to say, an infinite set of material bodies, events, processes and states”
(Ilyenkov 2014, p. 32).
12 “The concrete thing is precisely and in the first place [...] the reciprocal connection and
objectively universal mutual dependence of a mass of individual phenomena” (Iliénkov
2017, p. 136), in the next page, this idea is explained through the natural example of the
interaction between to chemical particles.
13 Lukács 1971, p. xviii.
14 Schmidt 1971 p. 196. See also Sartre 1976.
15 Ilyenkov 2009, p. 150.
around.16 As Ilyenkov puts it: “Ideality, thus, has a purely social nature and
origin, and yet the ideal, in the form of knowledge, reflects objective reality,
which exists independently of humanity.”17
In short, Ilyenkov follows Engels’ idea that, while activity, in general, is a
universal property of all that exists, its superior rational (ideal) form that
grasps the blind regularities of nature and transforms them into purposeful
expressions of our consciousness and will is a function of nature as a whole
that only arises within specific (social) conditions.18
I hope that by developing this interpretation, I can contribute to the
international resurgence of interest in Ilyenkov’s work. In the last 5 years or
so there have been ambitious editorial efforts to publish unpublished
manuscripts of Ilyenkov for the first time, his work is being translated into
many languages, books and articles by and about Ilyenkov are appearing,
and academics events on his thought are taking place around the world. I
remember proudly when I resisted those 'advice-givers' who told me once
that I was throwing away my career researching a topic that nobody really
cares about anymore. That’s why I wish to conclude this short talk by
sincerely thanking you all that, with your kind presence here, are proving
those advisers wrong.

Bibliography
Engels, Friedrich 1987a, ‘Anti-Dühring’, in Collected Works, edited by Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Vol. 25, New York: International Publishers.
Engels, Friedrich 1987b, ‘Dialectics of Nature’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected
Works, New York: International Publishers.
Iliénkov, Evald Vasílievich 2009, La dialéctica antigua como forma de pensamiento, Las Villas:
Centro de Documentación e Información Científico Técnica Universidad Central "Marta
Abreu".
Iliénkov, Evald Vasílievich 2017, La dialéctica de lo abstracto y lo concreto en "El Capital" de
Marx, Quito: Edithor.
Ilyenkov, Evald V. 2009, The Ideal in Human Activity, Pacifica, CA: Marxists Internet Archive.
Ilyenkov, Evald V. 2014, ‘Dialectics of the Ideal’, in Dialectics of the Ideal, edited by Alex Levant
and Vesa Oittinen, 25–78, Leiden: Brill.
Ilyenkov, Evald Vasilyevich 2017, ‘Cosmology of the Spirit’, Stasis, 5, 2: 164-190.

16 “Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a
control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of
historical development” (Engels 1987a, p. 106).
17 Ilyenkov 2014, p. 58.
18 Ilyenkov also takes from Engels’ Dialectics of Nature the thesis that specifically human
thought only arises at a high level of historical development, with the socially conditioned
emergence of philosophical dialectics as the form of critically reflection of thought upon
itself. See Engels 1987b, p. 503 and Iliénkov 2009, pp. 16-17.
Levant, Alex 2014, ‘E.V. Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism: An Introduction to Dialectics of
the Ideal’, in Dialectics of the Ideal, edited by Alex Levant and Vesa Oittinen, 4-23,
Leiden: Brill.
Lukács, Geörg 1971, History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Oittinen, Vesa 2005, ‘Introduction’, Studies in East European Thought, 57, 3: 223-231. doi:
10.1007/s11212-005-1415-1.
Piedra Arencibia, Rogney 2018, ‘El papel del trabajo en el desarrollo del pensamiento humano’,
Hybris, 9, 2: 173-206.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1976, ‘Dialectics and Science’, Man and World, 9, 1: 60-74.
Schmidt, Alfred 1971 The Concept of Nature in Marx, London: NLB.