Stud East Eur Thought

DOI 10.1007/s11212-014-9187-0

Il’enkov’s Hegel

David Bakhurst

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract This paper examines Hegel’s place in the philosophy of Eval’d Il’enkov
(1924–1979). Hegel’s ideas had a huge impact on Il’enkov’s conception of the nature
of philosophy and of the philosopher’s mission, and they formed the core of his
distinctive account of thought and its place in nature. At the same time, Il’enkov was
victimized for his ‘‘Hegelianism’’ throughout his career, from the time he was sacked
from Moscow State University in 1955 to the ideological criticisms that preceded his
death in 1979. After considering Hegel’s influence on the history of Russian thought,
the paper focuses on Hegelian themes in Il’enkov’s 1974 book, Dialektičeskaja logika
and evaluates their philosophical significance. Finally, parallels are explored between
Il’enkov’s situation at the end of his life and the plight of Nikolaj Bukharin, incar-
cerated in the Lubjanka prison in 1936 and at work on Philosophical arabesques. Both
thinkers confronted the contradiction between their confidence in the rationality of
history and the tragic absurdity of Soviet reality, and both responded by affirming their
fidelity to Lenin and his vision of Marxism. In this way, they sought to make sense of
their respective situations in the face of extreme adversity. That they so much as
thought it worth trying owed much to Hegel’s influence.

Keywords Dialectics
Idealism
Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet

Academy of Sciences
Marxism
Materialism

1.

This paper examines Hegel’s place in the thought of Russian philosopher Evald
Il’enkov (1924–1979). Il’enkov was a significant figure in the rejuvenation of Soviet
philosophical culture after Stalin. In the early 1950s, he was one of a number of

D. Bakhurst (&)
Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
e-mail: david.bakhurst@queensu.ca

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young scholars who produced compelling research focused on Marx’s method.

Il’enkov defended his Candidate’s dissertation, Nekotorye voprosy material-
ističeskoj dialektiki v rabote K. Marksa ‘‘K kritike političeskoj ekonomii’’ at
Moscow State University (MGU) in September 1953. Alexander Zinov’ev, also at
MGU, defended on a similar topic the following year. Il’enkov and Zinov’ev had a
dramatic influence on the intellectual climate of Soviet philosophy in the mid-
1950s. Both taught seminars at Moscow State University, and what they taught and
how they taught it stood in stark opposition to the ossified dogma that Marxist
philosophy had become under Stalin. In the words of Lektorskij (2012, 328),
himself at that time a final year undergraduate in Il’enkov’s seminar, ‘‘it was as if a
new world had been discovered.’’
The inhabitants of the old world, however, were none too impressed, and before
long Il’enkov was in trouble. In 1954, he and another junior faculty member at
MGU, Valentin Ivanovič Korovikov, were asked to stage a discussion in their unit
(Kafedra istorii zarubežnoj filosofii) on the nature of philosophy. To this end, they
wrote a number of theses on philosophy, arguing principally that the subject matter
of philosophy is thought. The Il’enkov–Korovikov theses immediately sparked
controversy. They were taken to be at odds with the then-orthodox view that
philosophy’s province was the universal laws of being (encompassing nature,
society, and thought), to privilege epistemology over ontology, thereby undermining
Lenin’s ‘‘theory of reflection,’’ and to dismiss historical materialism as a non-
subject. At meetings of the Philosophy Faculty’s Scientific Council, Il’enkov and
Korovikov were subjected to severe criticism, and in the Spring of 1955 they were
sacked from MGU for ‘‘Hegelianism’’ (Novokhat’ko 1997, 5). Korovikov left the
profession and became a journalist. Il’enkov had fortunately already secured another
appointment at the Institute of Philosophy, where he remained for the rest of his
career.
At least in the short term, the Institute was a happier environment for Il’enkov.
However, notwithstanding the more liberal climate of the post-Stalin thaw and the
support of such senior philosophers as B. M. Kedrov and M. M. Rozental’, Il’enkov
continued to have difficulties. In 1956, a book based on his dissertation was denied
publication, a ban that was lifted in 1960 only to avoid the humiliation of its being
issued by Feltrinelli Editore, the Italian publisher that had published Dr. Zhivago.1
And those works he succeeded in publishing continued to provoke controversy. A
good example is his 1962 article Ideal’noe, which appeared in the second volume of
the landmark five-volume Filosofskaja entsiklopedija. Il’enkov’s defence of the
objectivity of ideal phenomena—and his corresponding denial that the realm of
thought can be reduced to brain functioning—was met with astonishment. Just like
his work on Marx’s method, its effect was to infuriate the orthodox while inspiring

1
The book was Il’enkov (1960). An English translation was published by Progress in 1982. The 1960
text was abbreviated and restructured to make it more acceptable to officialdom, though a more complete
version of the manuscript finally appeared as Il’enkov (1997). Lektorskij (2012, 283) describes the
circumstances of the 1960 publication. Novokhat’ko (1997, 4) offers a slightly different account. He does
not mention the role played by the prospect of an Italian edition in the original Russian publication,
though he does credit the Italian publishers for holding back their edition until the book had appeared in
Russia.

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the younger generation, and the more it did the latter, the more it did the former
(Lektorskij 2012, 284–85).
There is no doubting Il’enkov’s influence. Many of the more inventive figures in
late Soviet philosophy were either his students or they formed their views in dialogue
with, or opposition to, his. As V. S. Bibler put it, ‘‘We all came out from under
Il’enkov’s overcoat.’’2 Il’enkov’s career continued much as it had begun. Though his
achievements were recognized by his supporters and admirers—he received the
Černyševskij prize in 1965, saw his books translated by Progress Publishers and his
articles published in Voprosy filosofii and Kommunist—he continued to be a target of
ideological accusations. As Korovikov (1998) attests, Il’enkov’s work could be
decorated by the Academy one moment and denounced as a distortion of Marxism the
next. The accusations reached a peak in the mid-1970s, by which time Il’enkov was
thoroughly worn down (see Oizerman 2009, 36–38). His later writings, many of which
are popular or polemical in style, lack the depth and creativity of his early work. Ten
years after his untimely death in 1979, his old friend Korovikov wrote: ‘‘Pogroms big
and small cost Eval’d Vasil’evič a lot of strength, time, and creative energy, driving
him to distraction. He would have done significantly more for our spiritual life and
philosophical thought, were it not for constant oppression from the vigilant defenders
of ideology’’ (Korovikov 1998, 478).
Korovikov is not alone in this assessment. A similar picture is painted by
Mikhajlov (1998), Mareev (1994), Novokhatko (1991), and myself (Bakhurst 1991,
1995). But not everyone sees things the same way. Boris Kagarlitsky, for example,
reports that ‘‘in the sixties, and even more in the seventies, some quickening of
dialectical philosophical thought was observable in our country,’’ and he recognizes
Il’enkov’s centrality in this. However, he continues: ‘‘Later in the view of many
philosophers, F. Il’enkov (sic) failed to follow up his own conclusions but tried
instead to reconcile his dialectics with the official schemas, mitigating its critical
sense of the negation of reality’’ (Kagarlitsky 1989, 273). To put it starkly,
Kagarlitsky counters the interpretation of Il’enkov as a creative force downtrodden
and martyred by relentless ideological oppression, with the image of him as
someone who did not stand up to officialdom for long, and who fundamentally
compromised his independence of mind.3 Which is it?
I want to suggest that to understand Il’enkov’s contribution, and to arrive at a
balanced evaluation of his legacy, it helps to reflect on his relation to Hegel. Many
of the most interesting thoughts in Il’enkov’s writings are Hegelian in inspiration,
and it is precisely those ideas that provoked his critics to attack him and that cost
him and Korovikov their jobs at MGU. Moreover, Hegel informs not only
Il’enkov’s conception of philosophy, but his understanding of the role and mission
of a philosopher, and this sheds light on the way Il’enkov saw himself and his
situation at the end of his life.
2
Lektorskij (2012, 329) cites this remark but does not attribute it. In a personal communication, he
revealed it was Bibler who said it.
3
Mikhajlov confirms that such criticisms were made of Il’enkov’s character by his contemporaries
(though Mikhajlov does not agree with them, of course): ‘‘During his life, and after his death, bad things
were said of him. For example, that he was not a very brave person, that he was frightened of the
apparatus of oppression and therefore did not always write what he thought’’ (1998, 449).

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2.

It may seem strange that a person’s integrity might be measured, by others or by

himself, by his reading of Hegel. But ever since the Russian intelligentsia took an
interest in Hegel in the 1830s and 40s, the interpretation of Hegel’s ideas was
charged with a kind of moral significance, as if it were a mirror in which a person’s
true colours showed themselves. Herzen famously describes the mood:
There was not a paragraph in all three parts of the ‘‘Logic,’’ in the two of the
‘‘Aesthetic,’’ in the ‘‘Encyclopedia,’’ etc. which would not have been the
subject of desperate disputes for several nights in a row. People who loved
each other parted ways for whole weeks at a time because they disagreed
about the definition of ‘‘all-embracing spirit’’ or had taken as an insult an
opinion on the ‘‘absolute personality and its existence in itself.’’ Every
insignificant pamphlet…in which there was a mere mention of Hegel was
ordered and read until it was tattered, smudged, and fell apart in a few days
(Herzen 1956, 18, quoted in Siljak 2001, 338).
Hegel was important, of course, because his Eurocentric philosophy of history
graphically posed the problem of whether Russia’s destiny lay in its ‘‘Westernization’’
or in its fidelity to its own unique character. At first, Hegel’s confidence that the
rational is actual provided the Westernizers with an argument that enabled
reconciliation with the oppressive reality of Russian life under the Tsars: however
contrary to reason Russian actuality might seem, in all its Gogolian weirdness, it was
all part of a process in which rationality and freedom would eventually flourish in the
form of the European nation state. Before long of course, talk of reconciliation gave
way to a discourse of revolt, as the Hegelian dialectic was read as an affirmation of the
creative power of negation. For the Slavophiles, in contrast, Hegel’s preoccupation
with freedom and reason stood for a form of rational individualism that ran counter to
everything valuable in the Russian soul. Russia, they urged, must reject Hegel’s
conception of world history and remain a world apart.
Later in the nineteenth century, when Russian radicals turned to Marxism, the
interpretation of Hegel once again became a matter of passionate controversy, as the
revolutionary intelligentsia agonized over the extent to which Hegelian ideas were
integral components of an authentically Marxist stance. The issue exercised Lenin
in the years preceding the revolution, as is evidenced by his Philosophical
notebooks of 1914, which contain conspectuses of some of Hegel’s works,
particularly the Science of logic (Lenin 1960–1978, vol. 38).4
And after the Revolution, in the mid-1920s, Hegel’s significance was again
contested in the passionate dispute between two schools of Soviet Marxists: the
‘‘dialecticians,’’ led by A. M. Deborin, who argued that a materialist philosophy,
invoking dialectical principles derived ultimately from Hegel, was an essential
component of a scientific world-view, and the ‘‘mechanists,’’ positivist philosophers

4
It is a matter of controversy whether, and to what extent, Lenin’s studies of Hegel represent a departure
from the positions he took in his earlier Materialism and empiriocriticism (1960–1978, vol. 14) with its
scathing attack on Bogdanov and other Russian followers of Mach and Avenarius.

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who maintained that natural science could look after itself. Not that the mechanists
were hostile to Hegel as such. What they complained about was the codification of
dialectics into abstract schema. Ljubov Akselrod wrote: ‘‘Dialectical method must
be a tool for the cognition of reality, but the dialectic must not intrude upon reality,
it must not prescribe to objective reality from its formal laws. Hegel himself, despite
his absolute idealism, was incomparably more empirical than the ‘orthodox’ and
‘militant’ materialist Deborin’’ (Akselrod 1927, 148).5 ‘‘Thanks to the universality
of the laws of dialectics,’’ Akselrod complains, the Deborinites find it ‘‘possible to
talk about everything while knowing nothing, to talk in abstract terms, imparting a
scholarly appearance to pure contentlessness’’ (159).6
In 1929, the mechanists were defeated by the Debornites, who were themselves
soon after routed by a group of young party activists, reputedly sponsored by Stalin
himself. This new generation called for the ‘‘Bolshevization’’ of philosophy, and
once in power, they oversaw the codification of dialectical materialism into
something far more rigid than anything proposed by Deborin. Their conception was
expressed with terrifying simplicity in the infamous 4th Chapter of the Short course
published in 1938 (see Bakhurst 1991, 95–99).
It might be supposed that there is nothing else to say about the reception of Hegel
in this period, and hence that the next chapter begins with Il’enkov and others trying
to renew materialist dialectics in the 1950s and 60s. But we must not overlook
Nikolaj Bukharin, who in 1937 was incarcerated in the Lubjanka Prison facing
certain death, and at work on (among other things) Philosophical arabesques, a
treatise on Marxist philosophy, thoughtfully composed and elegantly written. One of
Bukharin’s primary aims in this book is to come to terms with ‘‘the great treasure
trove of thought’’ that is Hegel’s dialectics (Bukharin 2005, 160). There is something
wonderful about Bukharin’s prison writings, but there is also something bizarre, for
how could someone think that his desperate situation, and the desperate situation of
his country, called for this, a vindication of materialist dialectics? After all, writing
this book was not something Bukharin did to pass long hours in confinement. He saw
the survival of this treatise as more important than his own, pleading with Stalin,
‘‘Don’t let it be lost!… Have pity! Not on me, on the work!’’ (quoted in Hellbeck
2009, 76).7 In his powerful article, ‘‘With Hegel to salvation: Bukharin’s other trial,’’
Jochen Hellbeck suggests that we should understand Bukharin as putting himself
through a second trial: ‘‘an extended process of self-interrogation and an attempt to
transform himself as a thinker and revolutionary actor’’ (78). Hellbeck argues that
Hegel has a lot to do with why Bukharin felt he had to undergo this. First, in his 1922
‘‘Testament,’’ Lenin famously qualified his estimation of Bukharin as ‘‘a most
valuable and major theorist of the Party’’ by describing him as an undialectical

5
There is a helpful website devoted to Akselrod’s life and work, which includes a number of Russian
texts and some in English translation: http://sovlit.org/lia/index.html (last accessed, 13th January, 2014).
6
Some 30 years later, Marcuse (1961, 122) concurred with Akselrod’s assessment: ‘‘Soviet Marxism is
nowhere more ‘orthodox’ than in its painful elaboration of the dialectical method… [T]he very essence of
dialectics rebels against such codification… [Dialectic] has been transformed from a mode of critical
thought into a universal ‘world outlook’ and universal method with rigidly fixed rules and regulations,
and this transformation destroys the dialectic more thoroughly than any revision.’’
7
Hellbeck is himself quoting Stephen Cohen.

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thinker.8 This was not a gratuitous criticism: throughout the 1920s Bukharin was
allied with the mechanists. Fifteen years after Lenin’s assessment, Bukharin was
trying to show that he now understood the significance of dialectics, thereby affirming
his fidelity to Lenin’s vision. Second, in undertaking this process, Bukharin’s
judgement was informed by a vision of history, and of historical agency, that had its
source in Hegel. Bukharin could not fail to think in terms of a single world-historical
narrative. He could not cease caring about Russia’s place, and his own, within that
narrative. And he could not stop trying to make sense, unifying, ordering, synthesizing,
rationalizing. What he failed to see was that Marx and Engels’s famous character-
ization of the bourgeois epoch as one where ‘‘all that is solid melts into air and
everything sacred is profaned’’ (Marx and Engels 1968, 38) now applied with appalling
irony to the circumstances in which he found himself. Bukharin’s confidence in the
rationality of history, and of his place in it, derived ultimately from Hegel.

3.

Now let us turn to Il’enkov. As we have seen, the vision advanced in the Il’enkov–
Korovikov theses is that philosophy is the theory of thought (nauka o myšlenii). On
this view, the primary subject-matter of philosophy is logic, not in the narrow sense of
symbolic logic, but logic as the study of the nature and possibility of our fundamental
forms of thought, of categories and concepts, and of the movement of thought and the
norms that govern it. Since this is a logic of content, not merely form, its account of
the evolution of thought forms, and of the nature of reasoning and argument,
encompasses questions about the nature of knowledge and scientific method, together
with questions about (what philosophers would now call) the sources of normativity.
This is the rationale for understanding philosophy as the identity of logic, dialectics,
and the theory of knowledge. This identity was famously asserted by Lenin in the
Philosophical notebooks (1960–1978, vol. 38, 319), but Il’enkov’s allegiance to it is
not mere lip-service to Lenin. Rather, Il’enkov sees this as a profound consequence of
Hegel’s legacy, which Lenin understood.
To examine what Il’enkov makes of this idea, I propose to consider his 1974
book, Dialektičeskaja logika.9 According to Kagarlitsky, or rather his unnamed
sources, by the time Il’enkov wrote Dialektičeskaja logika, the rot had already set
in: here begins Il’enkov’s reconciliation with Soviet dogma.10 I do not think this is a
8
‘‘Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; he is also rightly considered the
favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great
reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of dialectics, and, I think,
never fully understood it)’’ (Lenin 1960–1978, vol. 36, 593–611). The material was first published in
Kommunist in 1956 (no. 9).
9
Il’enkov (1974). A second edition with supplementary materials appeared in 1984. An English
translation was published by Progress in 1977 and is reprinted in its entirety in Il’enkov (2009), 1–214. In
what follows, page references are to 1974 Russian edition with parenthetical references to the 2009
English text. The identity of logic, dialectics, and the theory of knowledge is the subject-matter of
Chapter 9.
10
Kagarlitsky writes (1989, 273), ‘‘From this standpoint his book Dialectical Logic (1974) was already a
step back.’’

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fair assessment. The book is an attempt to weave material from a number of

Il’enkov’s earlier writings into a coherent story about the emergence of the
conception of logic just outlined (it incorporates several previously published
works, including the famous 1962 essay on the ideal). In the course of this, we are
treated to characteristically deferential statements about the founders of Marxism,
but the resulting picture amounts to an affirmation of the conception of philosophy
Il’enkov had expressed with Korovikov 20 years earlier. It is therefore superficial to
portray Dialektičeskaja logika as an attempt at reconciliation with the tenets of
official Soviet philosophy.
The overarching question that motivates Il’enkov’s inquiries is the problem of
thought’s relation to its objects: How is it possible for thought to bear on the world?
Il’enkov’s concern is to transcend philosophical conceptions that think of the
relation between mind and reality as one between ‘‘two worlds,’’ the internal world
of thoughts and experiences, on the one hand, and the external world of objects, on
the other. Such conceptions are naturally preoccupied with philosophical bridge-
building, trying to show how the two worlds are related, metaphysically and
epistemically (What is the relation of mind and matter? How is knowledge
possible?). In my earlier writings, I tended to portray this as a matter of transcending
Cartesian oppositions, and while this is not wrong, it fails to acknowledge the
pivotal role played by Kant’s philosophy in the German tradition that shapes the
way Il’enkov understands his project.11
Kant famously argued that our experience of the world is essentially structured
by a priori forms of intuition (space and time) and thought (the categories). The
world as we experience it issues from the unity of sensibility and understanding, a
unity that makes possible objective knowledge of an independently-existing world.
But Kant’s achievement is qualified. It is a consequence of his view that we cannot
represent the world as it is out of all relation to experience. Thus, his famous slogan,
‘‘things-in-themselves are unknowable.’’ As a result, Kant too finds himself talking
of two worlds, this time the ‘‘phenomenal’’ and the ‘‘noumenal,’’ the world of
experience and the world ‘‘in itself,’’ and his philosophy leaves human beings
peculiarly bifurcated. We are inhabitants of the phenomenal world, and as such we
are natural beings subject to natural law, but freedom and rationality are aspects of
the noumenal or ‘‘intelligible’’ world. As Allen Wood puts it (2008, 135):
So the same actions that we regard as naturally necessitated in the world of
appearance can be regarded as transcendentally free with reference to their
noumenal cause. When we think of ourselves as appearances, we are
determined, but when we think of ourselves as moral agents, we transport
ourselves into the intelligible world, where we are transcendentally free.
In response to this Kantian picture, Il’enkov draws from Hegel the following
insights:

11
See e.g. Bakhurst (1997) (written in 1988). The discussion in Bakhurst (1991, 200–212) is better, but
offers a rather one-dimensional view of the Kantian options.

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(a) We must historicize the categories. The fundamental forms of thought are not
given a priori, but are realized historically as social consciousness.
(b) The vehicle of social consciousness is not just language, but action; thought is
embodied not just in utterances, but in the results of human activity:

The thought of which Hegel spoke discloses itself in human affairs every bit
as obviously as in words… man’s actions, and so too the results of his actions,
the things created by them, not only could, but must, be considered
manifestations of his thought, as acts of the objectifying of his ideas,
thoughts, plans and conscious intentions (Il’enkov 1974, 128 (2009, 101)).
Thought is therefore realized in culture and the humanized environment, in what
Marx called the ‘‘inorganic body of man.’’ This is an anti-psychologistic vision
of thought, one where ‘‘the whole immense objective body of civilisation’’ is
portrayed as ‘‘thought in its ‘otherness’’’ (1974, 128 (2009, 101)).

(c) We must think of the mindedness of individuals, not as given, but as emerging
through the appropriation or internalization of those modes of thought that are
embodied in the practices of the community constitutive of social conscious-
ness. Individuals acquire powers of reason—they become persons, rational
agents, through Bildung.12
(d) We must recognize that all modes of mindedness are penetrated by
conceptuality: thought is present in sensation (intuition), imagination,
intelligent activity and embodied coping (Il’enkov 1974, 131–132 (2009,
104–105)). Moreover, the world is in no way alien to the conceptual: objective
reality is thinkable. The world as we think it, as we sensuously perceive it, and
as it is, is one and the same world; namely, the real world (1974, 160 (2009,
128)). That is, as McDowell puts it (1994, 27), there is no gap between mind
and world inherent in the very idea of thought. Thought can be at one with the
world. This is the sense in which Il’enkov embraces the idea of the identity of
thinking and being and follows Hegel in rejecting the Kantian idea of the
thing-in-itself.
(e) We must acknowledge that contradiction is the notion central to understanding
the movement of thought. There can be ‘‘objective contradictions’’ in the sense
that circumstances force thought into dilemmas and antinomies that can be
resolved only by changing reality.
(f) Empirical concepts function, or ought to function, not just as means of
identifying phenomena of the same kind in virtue of shared characteristics, but
as tools for expressing the essence of the phenomenon in question understood
in its historical concreteness. A ‘‘concrete universal’’ expresses the essence of

12
This is the basis of Il’enkov’s conception of the socio-cultural preconditions of mind, a view I discuss
in many writings; see e.g. Bakhurst (1991), chs. 6–7, and (2005a). Il’enkov took his view to support a
humanist conception of education (see Il’enkov 2002). Kozulin (1984, ch. 7) gives an interesting, and
somewhat sceptical, view of Soviet humanism in education. I discuss Il’enkov’s philosophy of education
in Bakhurst (2005b). For my own attempt to develop a socio-historical conception of mind with relevance
to education (inspired by Il’enkov among others), see Bakhurst (2011).

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an object understood as a self-developing totality, all the components of which

are united by unity of genesis (Il’enkov 1974, 256 (2009, 204)).13

4.

Il’enkov embraces all of this. Moreover, he explicitly rejects as superficial the

criticisms that Hegel’s philosophy is mystagogical, that it ‘‘logicizes’’ reality or
reifies logical forms. On the contrary, the dialectic captures the evolution of the
thought forms we bring to bear on reality, by which reality is manifest to us and by
which we come to attain self-consciousness as thinking beings aware of our power
to embrace the world in thought. The primary problem with Hegel’s philosophy,
Il’enkov tells us, is that it portrays thought as a self-determining creative principle
and the material world as its expression. It therefore denies itself an account of the
origin of thought itself (Il’enkov 1974, 173 (2009, 137)). To correct this aspect of
Hegel’s philosophy, we need to naturalize Hegel’s conception of thinking, so that
thought is reconceived as an aspect of the existence of embodied, material beings.
Il’enkov portrays this correction more as a minor adjustment than as a wholesale
inversion. He is keen to stress how Hegel, as Lenin tells us in his conspectus of the
Lectures on the history of philosophy, comes ‘‘very close to materialism’’ (Il’enkov
1974, 129 (2009, 102), citing Lenin 1960–1978, vol. 38, 278).
To make the necessary adjustment, Il’enkov offers his philosophy of the ideal,
which is inspired by Marx—not just the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, whose
influence is obvious, but the mature Marx of Capital, whose labour theory of value
illustrates an instance of the origin of an ideal form (value) out of material activity
(labour). The message of Il’enkov’s discussion of the ideal, by which he means the
realm of thought (broadly construed as in (i) and (ii) above) is that the ideal exists
objectively in forms of human life-activity. As he puts it, Hegel teaches us that:
All the spontaneously emerging forms of the organization of human social
(collectively realized) life-activity, forms that exist prior to, outside, and
completely independently of individual minds, are one way or another
materially embodied in language, in ritually-prescribed customs and rights
and, further, as ‘‘the organization of the state,’’ with all its material means and
agencies for the protection of traditional forms of life. [These forms] stand
over against the individual (the physical body of the individual with his brain,
liver, heart, hands and other organs) as a whole, organized ‘‘in itself and for
itself,’’ as something ‘‘ideal,’’ within which all particular things acquire a
different significance and play a different role, than they do ‘‘in themselves,’’
that is, outside this whole. Therefore, the ‘‘ideal’’ definition of anything, or its
definition as a ‘‘disappearing’’ moment in the movement of the ‘‘ideal world,’’
coincides in Hegel with its role and significance in the body of social-human

13
The final two chapters of Dialektičeskaja logika are devoted to contradiction and the universal
respectively. There is much more on these themes in Il’enkov’s works on the dialectics of the abstract and
the concrete, discussed in Bakhurst (1991), ch. 5.

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culture, in the context of socially-organized human life-activity, and not in the

consciousness of an individual person, which is here regarded as something
produced out of the ‘‘universal spirit’’ (Il’enkov 1991, 250).14
To turn this picture into a materialist one, we just need to recognize that the
objectification of human activity is the source of the nature and possibility of
thought, both at the level of the species and the individual. It is doing that is the
ultimate source of normativity, and since our freedom resides in our ability to
respond to norms, we have to understand that freedom as manifest in the life-
activity of embodied material beings or ‘‘thinking bodies’’ as Il’enkov liked to say.
The adjustment to Hegel’s philosophy is anticipated by Goethe’s Mephistopheles
and his famous correction to scripture: In the beginning was, not the word, logos,
but the deed—‘‘Im Anfang war die Tat.’’15 There remains a sense in which each
mind is derived from universal spirit, in that each individual becomes a minded
being only though initiation into the practices that sustain the ideal realm, but the
universal spirit has no reality independently of those practices.
If we make this adjustment correctly, then we can say that logical forms are not
expressions of thought thinking itself, but ‘‘universal forms of the development of
reality outside thought’’ (Il’enkov 1974, 128 (2009, 102)): ‘‘all the dialectical
schemas and categories revealed in thought by Hegel were universal forms and
laws, reflected in the collective consciousness of man, of the development of the
external real world existing outside of and independently of thought’’ (183 (2009,
146)). This is to say that the realm of thought is the means by which human beings
bring the world into view, the means by which the world is disclosed to them, or at
least can be disclosed if circumstances permit its veridical apprehension. When
things go right, thought embraces reality as it is.
Though there are places in Dialektičeskaja logika where Il’enkov is more
conventionally critical of Hegel, the respect he shows him in the pivotal chapters of
that work leaves no doubt about the centrality of Hegel to Il’enkov’s vision.16 Thus
the idea that the work represents the beginnings of a compromise with orthodoxy
seems to me to be a profound misreading.
It is worth observing that the recent interest in Hegel within the Anglo-American
tradition only serves to bring out the continuing relevance of Il’enkov’s treatment of
Hegel. Terry Pinkard (2002), for example, represents the whole post-Kantian
tradition in German philosophy as grappling with what he calls the ‘‘Kantian
paradox.’’ This is a paradox about the nature of normativity. For Kant, I am free in
so far as I conform my actions to norms that I give myself. Yet if my endorsement is
to be rational, it must be grounded in reasons, but then it seems that my conformity
14
My translation. The passage also appears in Il’enkov (2009, 263–264.)
15
One interesting (and neglected) essay of Il’enkov’s on the relation of Hegel and Marx is ‘‘Gegel i
«otčuždenie»,’’ published in Il’enkov (1991, 141–152). Here Ilyenkov speaks of Marx liberating himself
from the notion of the objectification of absolute spirit in favour of a view of the alienation of human
practical activity in the form of its products (147–148).
16
Il’enkov’s criticisms of Hegel are restrained. For example, he never goes as far as Bukharin, who, for
all his sympathy with Hegel, writes (2005, 81) that Hegel replaced ‘‘the world of reality, the material
world, by a game of self-motivated ideas’’ and speaks of ‘‘the panlogistic gibberish of objective idealism
elevated to the status of a grandiose universal system.’’

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Il’enkov’s Hegel

is determined by something outside of myself—namely, the cogency of the reasons

in question—and hence I am not self-determining but unfree. According to Pinkard
(and others), Hegel’s solution to the paradox depends upon recognizing the sociality
of reason. We are free insofar as we conform our actions to norms we give
ourselves: the sources of normativity reside in our mutual recognition of each other
as sources of normative authority. This debate is in the same territory as Il’enkov’s
discussion of the problem of the ideal, which as we have seen, invokes the notion of
collective human activity in response to the question of how the realm of thought—
that is, the realm of the normative—is possible. It is a matter of contention whether
Il’enkov would have had sympathy for Pinkard’s rendition of the problem, let alone
endorsed his account of a Hegelian solution, but there is no doubt that their
respective approaches can be brought into dialogue, and that suggests that
Dialektičeskaja logika not only preserves some of the more creative themes from
Il’enkov’s early work, but does so in a way that is of enduring philosophical
interest.17

5.

I have been arguing that Hegel is at the very centre of Il’enkov’s argument in
Dialektičeskaja logika and that Il’enkov’s reading of Hegel is an attractive one.
Hegel’s insights are brought to bear to reconcile mind and world, individual and
community, reason and nature. The grand philosophy of history that casts reason as
‘‘substance’’ and ‘‘infinite power,’’ ‘‘that by which all reality has its being’’ (Hegel
1956, 9) has no place, but neither is there room for an Engelsian metaphysics of
nature. Rather, the attentions of philosophy are turned towards the activity—the
everyday life-activity—of embodied subjects at home in an environment that is
leant value, meaning, and normative significance by their collective activity. Of
course, the founders of Marxism are recognized for their development of this vision
(which, at least in the case of Marx is appropriate), and lip service is paid here and
there as needs must, but the substance of this work is ‘‘soveršenno normal’naja
filosofija,’’ as my mentor Feliks Mikhajlov might have said.
But of course this is not the end of the story. The fact is that some of Il’enkov’s
writings after Dialektičeskaja logika do come across as allied to official Soviet
Marxism–Leninism, not just in their rhetoric but in their choice of subject-matter.
This is not true of the long article, ‘‘Problema ideal’nogo’’ (1979), published
posthumously in Voprosy filosofii, in which Il’enkov returns to his views on the
ideal and brings them into dialogue (or rather confrontation) with then current
Soviet work in the philosophy of mind. But it is true of his last book, Leninskaja
dialektika i metafizika pozitivisma (1980), and a number of contemporaneous
articles.18 In these writings, Il’enkov gives centre-stage to Lenin’s contribution,
17
For further discussion of this theme see Bakhurst (2012).
18
Some of these articles (e.g. ‘‘Materializm voinstvujuščij—znachit dialetičeskij’’ [‘‘Militant materi-
alism means dialectical materialism’’]) were included to supplement the text of the 1984 edition of
Dialektičeskaja logika (286–304). If my reading of the 1974 edition is correct, they detract from the spirit
of the original text.

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 D. Bakhurst

defending his stance in Materialism and empiriocriticism, with its critique of

Russian empiriocriticism, and praising the insightfulness of Lenin’s deliberations in
the Philosophical notebooks, especially his reading of Hegel. Significantly, Il’enkov
argues that Lenin’s philosophical vision represents a coherent, unified whole. He
discerns no tension between Lenin’s 1909 critique of Bogdanov, his 1914 writings
on Hegel, or his 1922 intervention ‘‘On the significance of militant materialism’’
(Lenin 1960–1978, vol. 33, 227–236). The message is that Lenin was right all
along.19
Let me quote from the conclusion of Leninskaja dialektika:
In place of the Machist conception of cognition which he demolishes, and in
the course of this ‘‘destruction,’’ Lenin gives an explanation of dialectics as
the genuine theory of knowledge and logic of Marx and Engels. This is the
advantage of Lenin’s criticism of Machism over Plekhanov’s.
The Philosophical Notebooks continue the same line… (Il’enkov 2009, 389)
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism now continues to be the most timely
Marxist work in the field of philosophy where until now the front lines have
run in the war of Marxism–Leninism for materialist dialectics, for the logic
and theory of knowledge of modern-scientific, intelligent, dialectical mate-
rialism. This is the war for militant materialism, without which there is not and
cannot be a Marxist-Leninist world outlook.
Revolution is revolution, regardless of whether it occurs in the socio-political
‘‘organisms’’ of an enormous country or in the ‘‘organism’’ of contemporary
scientific development. The logic of revolutionary thinking and the logic of
revolution are one and the same thing. And this logic is called materialist
dialectics.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism teaches this above all else if it is read in
the light of the entire subsequent history of the political and intellectual
development of Russia and the entire international revolutionary movement of
the working class. History has clearly shown where the path of Lenin has led
and is leading. It has also shown the crooked pathways of revising the
principles of the logic of revolution from the point of view of positivism
(Il’enkov 2009, 391).
One might conclude that, since such passages clearly seem to speak for
Kagarlitsky’s interpretation of the trajectory of Il’enkov’s career, the dispute
between us can only be over when, rather than if, Il’enkov compromised his
philosophical principles.
But I think we need a more nuanced understanding of Il’enkov’s situation. In my
earlier discussions of this material, I argued that although Il’enkov is unquestionably
to be faulted for his uncritical reconstruction of Lenin as philosopher, these late
writings have redeeming features. True, Il’enkov ignores the fact that, whatever

19
Lektorskij (2012, 337) observes that during the discussion of the Il’enkov-Korovikov theses, A.
S. Arsen’ev argued (bravely) that Materialism and empiriocriticism should be read as an immature work
in comparison to the Notebooks. It is revealing, therefore, that Il’enkov takes the contrary view in his own
late writings (as does Bukharin).

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Il’enkov’s Hegel

might be said for views Lenin endorses, Lenin’s manner of doing philosophy, in
which arguments are embroidered with name-calling and abuse, helped create the
very philosophical ‘‘culture’’ that Il’enkov set himself against and that ultimately
swallowed him up. For all that, however, Leninskaja dialektika is not without
philosophical interest—it includes, for example, a lengthy discussion of Bogdanov’s
views—and it contains a progressive subtext; namely, that positivism has triumphed
in contemporary Soviet intellectual life, just as scientism and technocracy has in
Soviet political culture. Small wonder that message had to be concealed under a
layer of orthodoxy.20 Moreover, I think that this sympathetic reading can draw
support from my reflections on Dialektičeskaja logika, as it is clear from the first of
the quotations above, that what Il’enkov seeks to defend by appeal to Lenin’s
authority is precisely his favoured conception of logic as the unity of the philosophy
of thought, dialectics, and the theory of knowledge, that same thesis he and
Korovikov defended.
I do not want, however, to engage in apologetics on Il’enkov’s behalf. The task is
to understand Il’enkov’s situation towards the end of his life. To this end, I think it
is helpful to reflect on the parallels between Il’enkov and the incarcerated Bukharin
at work on Philosophical arabesques.21 In the mid-1970s, Il’enkov faced a crisis,
one more mundane than Bukharin’s nightmare, but nonetheless one that had a
devastating effect on him. The Sector at the Institute of Philosophy at which he
worked (Sektor dialektičeskogo materializma), now led by Lektorskij (who had
become Head in 1969), became the target of vicious ideological criticism.22 A book
by members of the Sector, which was to include Il’enkov’s new work on the ideal,
was attacked at the Institute’s Scientific Council and refused publication. Il’enkov
took this hard. His reaction, I think, was to put himself through the same internal
‘‘trial’’ that Bukharin did. Like Bukharin, Il’enkov’s response was to try to reassert
his identity as a revolutionary thinker, an exponent of a living Marxist tradition of
thought. And again like Bukharin, he sought above all to affirm his allegiance to
Lenin, to make peace with, to prove himself to, the father figure of the Russian
Marxism.23
It is also significant that, although Hegel’s philosophy of history has no real place
in Il’enkov’s philosophy, Il’enkov, once again like Bukharin, saw his situation in
world-historical terms. Il’enkov was a more modest figure than Bukharin in several
respects, and I do not think that he was particularly concerned about his legacy, his
place in history. But I do think that Il’enkov must have asked himself some difficult
20
Mikhajlov encouraged me to see this as the book’s message; see Mikhajlov (1998, 448).
21
In what follows, I focus on parallels between the ways in which their respective predicaments caused
them to address the issues they did, rather than parallels between their philosophical views themselves.
The latter topic, however, is worthy of exploration. There is a remarkable congruence between positions
at which Bukharin arrives in Philosophical arabesques and some of Il’enkov’s key ideas.
22
See Lektorskij (2012, 286). Lektorskij mentions (360–361) that one of the most vocal critics of his
section was former KGB operative E. D. Modržhinskaja (see also Motrošilova 2009, 73). It transpires that
this is the same Elena Modržinskaja who was the KGB’s leading expert on the UK in the 1940s and wrote
a well-known report of the activities of the Cambridge Spies. See West and Tsarev (2009, 313 ff).
23
In Bakhurst (1991, ch. 4), I discuss different ways in which Lenin’s philosophy can be interpreted
(distinguishing between a ‘‘conservative’’ and a ‘‘radical’’ reading), and explore the nature of its influence
on Il’enkov.

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 D. Bakhurst

questions about what had been achieved since the heady days in which he and
Korovikov set out to refashion Soviet philosophy and, as Korovikov (1998, 473)
attests, to help their students to think for themselves. And the answers to those
questions must have been difficult to live with. Bukharin could see himself as swept
up by tremendously powerful historical forces, which though they might dash him
on the rocks, would flow onward and fashion something beautiful and joyful.24
Il’enkov, in contrast, could hardly summon that kind of optimism. At the height of
his powers, he had seen his mission as the development of a critical, humanistic
form of Marxism, and much of what he found in Hegel he deployed to that end. But
after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the project of
establishing ‘‘socialism with a human face’’ was in dire jeopardy. Il’enkov was not
only bitterly disappointed by events; his situation within the academic world had
worsened. After the Prague Spring, intellectuals were especially targeted as
potential threats and Il’enkov was identified as the primary exponent of the Soviet
version of Marxist humanism. For a while, he was protected by the leadership of the
Institute of Philosophy, first by V. P. Kopnin, who was Director 1968–1970, and
Kedrov, who led the Institute 1973–1974. But when B. S. Ukraintsev took over in
1974, the climate worsened significantly. As Korovikov remarks, Il’enkov left this
world at a time when the momentum of history had gone from the Soviet project and
Russian society was utterly stagnant, to use the metaphor that came to characterize
the period. What killed Il’enkov, according to his friend, was the unspiritual
(‘‘antidukhovnaja’’) atmosphere, from which all the oxygen had been sucked by
careerists, cynics, and petty bureaucrats. In such a world, it was no longer possible
to define one’s intellectual identity as a moment in the unfolding of a grand
historical project. What history was teaching was the irrelevancy of the idea of
history as Marxist-Hegelians typically understood it. Il’enkov’s reaction was first to
resist this lesson, and to keep trying to make sense, but this was not a stance that
proved possible to maintain for long. On 21st March, 1979, Il’enkov took his own
life.

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