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On the Materialist Interpretation of the Ideal by Evald Ilyenkov.

Abstract:

This paper explores the materialist and the object-based dimension of ‘the ideal’ in Evald
Ilyenkov’s thought and, consequently, his speculative technique of converging matter and
idea. The philosophic figures that Ilyenkov relies on to legitimate such a convergence are
Hegel, Spinoza and Marx. The paper reveals the complexities in Ilyenkov’s task to reconcile
his dialectics of the ideal with Spinoza’s studies of Substance, tracing the discrepancies in
Ilyenkov’s attempt to conjoin Hegelian and Marxian dialectics and Spinoza’s non-idealist
immanentism. The reference to the researchers of Spinozism, such as Macherey, Deleuze,
Badiou, Della Rocca, Oittinen, and Maidansky confirms the difficulties in discerning
dialectics in Spinoza’s thought. Ilyenkov managed to reveal that Hegel’s idealism was
grounded in an objective materialism conditioned by the other-determined self, and merely
needed Marx’s thought to complete the socialization of Subject; whereas Spinoza never truly
needed to theorize the concept of the ideal. The key finding of the paper is in tracing how -
due to developing Marxist epistemology out of Marxist political economy - Ilyenkov manages
to consider social being and labor through noumenal parameters, proving that any material
activity can be seen as thought-oriented.

Key-words: The Ideal, the Other-than-itself, the Non-self being, Convergence of Thought
and Being, Hegel’s Dialectics, Spinozist Immanence, Political Economy, the Noumenal.

1. The Episteme of the Ideal

Since the 1960s the notions of the universal and the ideal have been considered redundant and
obsolete for social analysis in continental philosophy (post-structuralism, psychoanalysis,
passim), or were used only with negative, anti-emancipatory connotations. In post-war
continental philosophy the concept of the ideal enters into the realm of mythology, authority,
power, or ideology, representing an unsurpassed attachment of thought to metaphysics. It is
worth mentioning the dismissal of the ideal in psychoanalysis, Althusser’s critique of
ideology, or negative dialectics of Adorno, in which the pretentions for the ideal are but a
false attempt of redemption. The materialist interpretation of the ideal in such a context would
be a futile effort to assert the material parameters of what, by definition, is seen as torn from
materiality and associated with spiritual qualities. Yet Soviet Marxist thought at this time
continued to insist precisely on the materialist efficacy and the emancipatory potential of the
ideal (Lifshitz, 2003).

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As Evald Ilyenkov claims, the ideal is nothing but the phylogenetic inevitability of the
sociality of labor (of activity) – i. e. of inorganic second nature. Indeed, the ideal is a term to
define the diachronic, non-individual, non-literal character of human activity, which
facilitates the dialectical convergence between matter and idea, body and concept (Ilyenkov
2015). According to Ilyenkov, “the ideal is a special function of the human as a subject of
social and labor activity, performed in forms created by previous development”. (Ilyenkov
1962, p. 219). 1
But, why label the sociality of labor and its products the ideal specifically? What is so
indispensable in the term “ideal” for a theory of labor and materialist thought, when the term
historically has entailed so many anti-materialist connotations? Let us begin answering these
questions, by looking at the main principles of Ilyenkov’s philosophy.

Ilyenkov’s conceptual opus Dialectics of the Ideal (Ilyenkov 2015, pp. 25-81) appeared in the
Soviet Union in the early 1970s at the peak of the interest in cybernetics and
neurophysiology. His aim in this work (as well as others such as his last text Leninskaia
Dialektica i metafizika pozitivizma (1980) (Lenin's Dialectics and the Metaphysics of
Positivism) (Ilyenkov 2015a)) was a critique of any attempt to reduce philosophy and
materialist dialectics to positivist nominalism, to natural sciences and technology. The ideal,
for Ilyenkov, had to become the key instrument in the demonstration of the deficiencies of
positivism.

Ilyenkov disputes the dichotomy according to which consciousness and the psyche deal with
immaterial, ideal phenomena, and that, matter – conversely – resides in external reality. In
this case what is ‘in the head’, or in the imagination is considered ideal, whereas what is
beyond ‘the head’ (beyond the operations of consciousness), is treated as material. As
Ilyenkov argues, neuroscience demonstrates an even graver fallacy than phenomenology or
traditional idealism when it nominalizes consciousness and mental life, i.e. psychic capacities;
that is, when neuroscience brings mental phenomena to a non-dialectical aggregation of the
elemental series and then structures and studies this mechanistically as atomized neural data
(Ilyenkov 2015a).

Meanwhile, the ideal has an existence outside of the mind in the forms and products of human
activity. In this case the ideal is neither in the mind, nor in any concrete object which could
have been acknowledged ideal for its perfection. Rather the ideal is a materialist principle,
according to which, as Andrey Maidansky put it, “the essence of thing A receives a peculiar
other-being within the field of activity of thing B”. (Maidansky 2014, p.131).

1
Quotation translated by Giuliano Vivaldi.

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In his entry to Philosophic Encyclopedia titled “Ideal’noe” (The Ideal) Ilyenkov confirms
such an interpretation:

Thus, the definition of the ideal is deeply dialectical. It is that which is not, and nevertheless
is. It is that which does not exist as an external, sensuously perceptible thing, and yet exists as
active capacity of humans. It is being, which, however, is equal to not-being, or the
determinate being of an external thing in the phase of its becoming in the subject’s activity, in
the form of the subject’s internal images, requirement, urge and aim. From the structures of
the brain and language, the ideal image of an object is fundamentally different in that it is a
form of external object, not a form of the brain or language. The ideal differs from the
external object in that it is not directly objectified in the external substance of nature, but in
the inorganic body of man and in the body of language, as a subjective image. Consequently,
the ideal is, thus, the subjective being of the object, or the ‘other being’ of the object – the
being of one object in and through another, as Hegel had expressed this situation. 2 (Ilyenkov
1962, p. 221).

As is evident from the above excerpt, on the one hand, the Ideal has an existence outside of
the mind, in social activity, labor and cultural artefacts. On the other hand, Ilyenkov’s
mention of the ideal as “the ‘other being’ of the object” refers to Hegel’s Anderssein (the
other self). This reference demonstrates that the ideal for Ilyenkov is realized in the capacity
of an object to be other than itself – to be realized outside its ‘body’. 3 Indeed, Ilyenkov’s
interpretation of the ideal was very much influenced by Hegel’s notion of otherness
(Anderssein, the other determined non-self), functioning for Hegel as the inevitable
objectification of spirit, which brings about the concretion of the material world as the mind’s
other self. The spirit cannot be the self, as long as it is “alienated” (objectified, reified) in the
world and by the world. So, every “self” is defined through an “other-self”, which makes the
self not quite its own self. For Hegel the condition of Anderssein opens up an expansive field
of dialectics asserting the inevitable entanglement between the universal and the concrete, the
speculative and the material, mind and matter. Yet, this otherness is marked for Hegel in the
negative terms of the alienation of spirit in objects and thinghood. Ilyenkov, on the other
hand, in alignment with Marx, translates the “negative” semantics of Hegel’s objectification
of mind into affirmative terms, thus shifting the procedure of generalization and the non-self
being (the capacity of an object to be other than itself) into a materialist dimension. For
Ilyenkov Anderssein is the name for the emergence of any mental, conscious or personified
phenomena out of matter and the objective components of being (Ilyenkov 2015, p.51).

2
The quotation translated by Giuliano Vivaldi.
3
Andrey Maidansky emphasizes the relatedness of Ilyenkov’s treatment of the ideal through the other
self as the reference to Hegel’s Anderssein. (Maidansky 2014, p. 131)

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To sum up, the main premises in the anti-positivist framework of the ideal are 1. the quid pro
quo principle (Maidansky 2014, p.131) 4 (the other-determined non-self being of an object, or
of a subject, when its self is confirmed through the other self, i.e. the idea of the non-
literalness of things), 2. The capacity of abstract, symbolic categories (e.g. a word, a value
form) to reveal concrete events and activities 3. Purposefulness of human activity.

In order to demonstrate how “the ideal” and its quid pro quo principle functions, Ilyenkov
refers to the value form in Marx’s critique of political economy. The form of value is the
representation of a commodity, of the labor needed for its production, of time and costs.
Additionally, value is as well an expression of the relations of production and the means of
production involved in making a commodity. Following Marx, value for Ilyenkov, therefore,
is both an abstract sign, and a concrete operation referring to many aspects of social life and
production, revealing how the being of other-than-itself is embedded in the objecthood of a
product (a commodity), its “self”. Thus, the value form simultaneously plays the role of an
immaterial sign and pertains to the materiality of production and the concrete constellations
of social relations. The value form then is “ideal”, in so far as it is the “mirror” of a set of acts
and selves, without being itself any self, and without having any nominal topological
identification itself with those acts and other selves of social relations (Ilyenkov 2015, 52). In
other words, the ideal is something that is external to “me”, yet at the same time, it constructs
“me” as something objective, which nonetheless exceeds the nominal constraints of my
personal will, interests, biography, etc. For example, the prosodic form of the word Peter is
not identical to a real person who bears that name, but it points to him. This objective non-self
is thus not solely a transcendental construction, but is grounded in the outwardness of being,
in the outwardness of generic human activity, making human consciousness something
general and a counter psychic category as well.
This argumentation of Ilyenkov confirms the need of a thing to acquire the notion; and vice
versa, it emphasizes, that without the umbilical cord of the notion with the sensuous
perceptible bodies and activities, it, (a notion, a word, a term) remains only an empty fetish.

2. The Convergence of Matter and Idea: Hegelian/Marxian and/or Spinozist Methodologies

The fact that the ideal, thought or abstract notion are embedded in the concrete object-based
activity brought Ilyenkov to the understanding that there should be epistemological laws of
transition of these contradictory parameters into each other, - the laws enabling to attain their
convergence. Already in his earlier text “The Question of the Identity of Thought and Being

4
See the mention of the quid pro quo method in Ilyenkov’s work in Andrey Maidansky’s “Reality of
the Ideal” (Maidansky 2014, p. 132).

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in Pre-Marxist Philosophy” Ilyenkov posits these laws as the principles of dialectical logic
(Ilyenkov 1997, p.25). In the act of bringing together dialectics (the mode of being), and logic
(the mode of thought) one can discern Ilyenkov’s methodological attempt to claim the
necessity for logic to be dialectical (to be not simply the formal logic, but get inscribed in
being and materiality), and the necessity for being to be seen through noumenal parameters,
and not merely as empirical data. To the question of why at all such a convergence would be
indispensable, Ilyenkov answers in a following way:
“One can say that the principle of the dialectical identity of thought and being is a kind of
password for entering scientific philosophy, the borders of its subject. Those who do not
accept this principle will occupy themselves with pure “ontology”, pure “logic”, or one and
the other in turn, but they will never find the true way into dialectics as the logic and theory of
knowledge, into Marxist-Leninist philosophy” (Ilyenkov 1997, p.25).

***
The quest for the convergence of matter and thought, being and thinking, inevitably brought
Ilyenkov to Hegel and Spinoza as the two most eloquent philosophic endeavors in
surmounting the dualism of mind and matter. “The Question of the Identity of Thought and
Being in Pre-Marxist Philosophy” (1964), as well as the “Dialectical Logic” (1974) written
ten years later, map out most crucial methods of dealing with this dualism in the works of
Decartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx. Yet the question Ilyenkov sought to
answer, did not lie solely in the “identity” of thinking and being, but also in the epistemic
methods of positing and exerting such identity. To start with, then, the principal problem was
whether this union of thought and being had to be necessarily dialectical, or it could be
accomplished otherwise. Ilyenkov’s response was that for the convergence of being and
thought to work, the valency of the dialectical method was indispensable. Ilyenkov attempted
to ground the anti-dualist convergence of matter and thought by means of Hegelian and
Marxist dialectics, while, at the same time, relying on Spinoza’s immanentism. In other
words, he tried to reconcile Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics and the monist correspondence of
mind and matter in Spinozism. In this latter case, both the plane of mind and the plane of
matter are the attributes of one and the same substance and are сo-extensive to each other,
despite remaining distinct and conceived through their own selves. This distinction though, -
as, for example, Michael Della Roca argues in his Representation and the Mind-Body
Problem in Spinoza (Della Roca 1996, p. 141-57) - marks only the epistemological

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disjunction and parallelism of mind and matter, while denying the ontological separation
between them. 5
Ilyenkov’s endevour to posit the union of thought and matter was first made in “The Question
of the Identity of Thought and Being in Pre-Marxist Philosophy” (Ilyenkov (1964) 1997), and
then developed in his book Dialectical Logic (Ilyenkov 1974). Hegel is interpreted in it as a
thinker who invented the dialectical inseparability of the objective reality and the spirit (logic,
mind), of consciousness and history – the inseparability of the ideal and the material activity
(Ilyenkov 1984, pp.109-39). For Hegel, spirit claims consciousness via the material world,
even though this “descent” of spirit into the materiality of the world presupposes the spirit’s
alienation. Yet, in the process of acquisition of self-consciousness, spirit (reason) struggles
with this alienation to encompass the objective world. All dialectical schemes are the forms of
the development of the extrinsic, the objective phenomena, which are reverberated (otrajeno)
in consciousness; whereas the world in its material, natural and historical versatility remains
both independent from thinking, yet reliant on, and needful of, thought.

Nevertheless, as Ilyenkov argues, if for Hegel the life of a human possesses a certain form
because a human thinks in a certain way, Marx overturns such a disposition. For him, on the
contrary, a human being thinks in a certain way since their life has this or that form. This
means that for Hegel sensuous concreteness is merely the medium for the manifestation of the
general (the universal); it is subsequent and subordinate to its grandeur, whereas, according to
Ilyenkov, it should be otherwise: the general, the conceptual should actually be a subsequent
attribute and manifestation of any material concreteness, which is always initial (Ilyenkov
2015, p. 52).

***
The focus on the monism of materiality and thought is the reason why Ilyenkov finds Spinoza
so important. Yet, as previously mentioned, Ilyenkov believed that he could subject the
Spinozist premise, according to which thought is the attribute of Substance, to dialectical
treatment (thereby tracing how in post-Cartesian philosophy res extensa and res cogitans
could be correlated). This was an imperative for Ilyenkov, since according to him, the
convergence of matter and concept could not take place merely contingently (accidentally),
fortuitously, or performatively – it would need dialectical methods to be implemented.

5
In the Scholium to Proposition 10 of Part One Spinoza writes: “…although two attributes may be
conceived to be really distinct (i.e., one may be conceived without the aid of the other), we still cannot
infer from that that they constitute two beings, or two different substances.” Spinoza explains here
something about the relationship among attributes—one may be conceived without the aid of the
other—namely, that conceiving attributes independently is not evidence of the existence of
independent substances (Spinoza 1954, 47).

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Spinoza’s method relies on the immanence of the conceptual plane of being to the empirical
one; it does not presuppose that the contingent and accidental appearance of phenomena
should be generalized into any augmented representation of their thruthfullness. Substance
manifests itself in the modes which are discreet accidental selves, rather than
incommensurable phenomena, determined by other selves.
And it is here – i.e., in the question of how and with which methodology to converge thinking
and being – that the divergence between Hegel’s dialectics and Spinoza’s immanentism
arises.

The performative and accidental methods of aggregation сharacteristic for Spinoza’s monism
differ from Hegel’s dialectical cycle, in that the latter is conditioned by the accumulative
developmental power and irreversibility of a concrete stage of a cycle; indeed, contingency
and accidentality demonstrate neither progress, nor irreversibility in “ascending”. The
elements aggregate in their accidentality without acquiring a qualitatively augmented, new
stage or “critical mass”. In the Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel dwells at length
on the speculative parameters of dialectical thinking as against discoursive ratiocianation,
which forms itself as the transition from the Subject to its accidents and Predicates. Such
transition in an ordinary discourse (rationcination) happens to be performative, whereas
dialectical thinking, according to Hegel, accommodates accidents and predicates, but it
always exceeds them: “thinking cannot roam at will, but is impeded by this weight of
(content)” (Hegel 1977, p. 37). 6 In other words, a speculative sentence of dialectics does not
perform the transition from the Subject to the Predicate. For example, in Hegel’s exemplary
speculative sentence “God is being” the Subject instead of passing to the Predicate “gets
absorbed” by the content; i.e. it turns into something more than simply Predicate, thus
enhancing the Substance, the Subject (Hegel 1977, p. 38), as “the Subject that fills its content
ceases to go beyond it, and cannot have any further Predicates or accidental properties”
(Hegel 1977, p. 37). If in the speculative method the “Subject signifies its Notion”, in the
ratiocinative method the Subject is superceded by its Predicate or accidental property. This is
why, according to Hegel “only a philosophical exposition that rigidly excludes the usual way
of relating the parts of a proposition could achieve the goal of plasticity” (Hegel 1977, p. 39).

6
[..]ratiocinative thinking is itself the self into which the content returns, in its positive cognition, on
the other hand, the self is a Subject to which the content is related as Accident and Predicate. This
Subject constitutes the basis to which the content is attached, and upon which the movement runs back
and forth. Speculative [begreifendes] thinking behaves in a different way. Since the Notion is the
objects's own self, which presents itself as the eaming-to-be of the object, it is not a passive Subject
inertly supporting the Accidents; it is, on the contrary, the self-moving Notion which takes its
determinations back into itself (Hegel 1977, p. 36-7).

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“Plasticity” – meaning here the dialectical incommensurability and indiscreetness of the

content.
It is important in this case that accidents and their performative contingency are rather seen
by Hegel as part of a habitual, discursive raisonnement. Not only do they not reach sense, or
the truth, but they even dissipate this content. This is the reason why Ilyenkov so ardently
tries to consider Spinozist thought through the lens of dialectics.

But is not labor or activity (deiatel’nost) performative or residing in empirical experience?

Indeed, labor consists of the material or immaterial actions that perform something. Yet, the
reason why labor (human activity in general) is not merely a performance is that it implies
more than the hic and nunc actions of a concrete individual; labor is comprised of
multilayered and multi-temporarily ramified acts, committed as the superimposition of
numerous non-self beings, inscribed in time and history diachronically as well as
synchronically. It implies a Subject, which cannot have a nominal place and location. Non-
self being is not focused on any special temporal condition; rather, it presupposes the
indiscreetness of both, the self and the other-than-the self.

It is true that the conditions of thinking are provided by nature (this Spinozist premise is
elaborated as early as in Ilyenkov’s Cosmology of Spirit in the mid 1950s). But Ilyenkov
emphasizes that what Marx adds to this Spinozist conjecture is that nature is not static and
unchangeable in its being substance. Nature is able “to think” only when it achieves the stage
when it is transformed; i.e. when things are being produced by means of labor by a human
being for other humans.

As such, it is precisely this achievement – labor – that makes possible the production of social
life. In Ilyenkov’s Dialectial Logic, it is labor that becomes the irreversible stage in the
dialectical development of matter. This is how Ilyenkov ends the chapter on Spinoza in
Dialectical Logic:

Of necessity, according to Spinoza, only substance possesses thought. Thinking is a necessary

premise and indispensable condition (sine qua non) in all nature as a whole. But that, Marx
affirmed, is not enough. According to him, only nature of necessity thinks, nature that has
achieved the stage of man socially producing his own life, nature changing and knowing itself
in the person of man or of some other creature like him in this respect, universally altering
nature, both that outside him and his own. A body of smaller scale and less “structural
complexity” will not think. Labour is the process of changing nature by the action of social
man, and is the “subject” to which thought belongs as “predicate” (Ilyenkov 1984, p. 54).

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Ten years earlier, in his “The Question of the Identity of Thought and Being in Pre-Marxist
Philosophy” (Ilyenkov (1964) 1997), Ilyenkov emphasizes a similar point, but adds the aspect
of an irreversible change that activity inevitably presupposes. According to Ilyenkov,
Spinoza’s achievement was that he surpassed the dualist object-subject relation in which the
material world is outside the brain and exists independently (Ilyenkov 1997, p.17). Spinoza’s
Substance was for him a confirmation that there is no other supernatural force outside and
external to the thinking body and the world. Moreover, this world does not “surround” man
for her to contemplate it, but man is in practical contact and interaction with it. Yet,
Ilyenkov’s reservation with Spinoza (as well as with Feuerbach) was that Spinoza did not
specify the role of activity and labor, - i.e. the fact that what is given to the individual is
always the product of activity of all other individuals, “interacting in the process of producing
material life”. It was Marx that, as Ilyenkov argues, made this crucial addition:

We shall not dwell here on the historically conditioned and hence unavoidable weaknesses of
Spinoza’s position. In general, and on the whole, these are the weaknesses of all pre-Marxist
materialism, including Feuerbach’s materialism. This is above all a lack of understanding of
the role of an “active” practical activity that changes nature. Spinoza has in mind only the
movement of thinking body along the ready-made contours of natural bodies. Thus, one loses
sight of the point that Fichte raised against Spinoza (and thereby against the form of
materialism he represents), namely, that man (the thinking body) does not move along ready-
made forms and contours given externally by nature but actively creates new forms that are
not proper to nature and moves along them, overcomes the resistance of the external world
and rejecting ready-made, imposed forms. (Ilyenkov 1997, 19).

David Bakhurst in his book Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy emphasizes
exactly this point, namely, that for Ilyenkov there is no pure physical environment, only a
noumenalized and meaningful one, since this environment cannot be detached from being
marked by human labor and activity (Bakhurst 1991, p. 87). Following this tenet, Ilyenkov
claims labor (and not simply nature or Substance) as the Subject to which thinking is the
extension.

This premise could have been disputed from the Spinozist standpoint; because, the Spinozist
perspective does not allow for a qualitative differentiation between a natural object and a
produced one, nature and artifact. In Proposition 7 of the Part 2 of his Ethics Spinoza says
simultaneously two things: 1. That there is “the same order or one and the same connection
of causes, or the same sequence of things” for the attribute of extension and the attribute of

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thought. 2. But at the same time, he claims that thought and extention function as distinct
selves, arguing that “when things are considered as modes of thought we must explain the
order of the whole of Nature by the attribute of thought alone, and when things are considered
as modes of extension, the order of the whole of Nature must be explained through the
attribute of extension alone” (Spinoza, 1954, p. 84). (Thus, the parallelism of matter and
thought does not contradict Spinoza’s monism, as it confirms them as co-extensive to each
other).
To reiterate, in the Spinozist context, activity is structurally commensurable, as opposed to a
speculative, cyclic and purposeful dialectical procedure. While for Ilyenkov, activity is
ideational even when material and social, it is incommensurable and does not belong to any
singular nominal location. In that case, Ilyenkov’s standpoint about the epistemological
mediation of labor that is dialectically evolving between nature and production – i.e. between
nature and culture – does not discard the Spinozist premise according to which nature
(Substance) remains the principal source of all transformations (a substance), except for one
necessary precondition: nature extends onto the stage of human labor, and as such turns into
labor as the nature’s dialectical development. A human being is then an inherent part of
nature and mediates nature, in as much as nature itself is molded into the process of labor and
human activity.

That said, nature should become unnatural, inorganic, in order to attain the transformative
stage of labor and hence reach the level necessary for thought. Nature, accordingly, is not
merely nature, but nature advanced to the evolutionary stage of the laboring sociality (second
inorganic nature), and hence the stage of thinking beings. In such reasoning Ilyenkov attempts
to conjoin Hegel’s dialectics, Marx’s social theory and Spinoza’s postulates on Substance
(Ilyenkov 1984).

3. Spinoza and Ilyenkov’s Materialist Dialectics.

The main achievement of Spinoza’s monism for Ilyenkov was in that he invented the new
logic of coordination between space and thought, proving that there can be no thinking
without spacialization and body. Spinoza, as Ilyenkov alleges, discovered a new condition –
that thought is exerted by the active, not an inactive body (i. e. the body which is in
interaction with other bodies) (Surmava 2018). It was due to Spinoza that, as Ilyenkov
argued, “thought is an action by a spatially organized body”, and there is no cause and effect
relation between thought and body. “As these are not two independently existing things, but
one and the same thing manifested in two ways, which rather reminds of the relation of an

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organ to its function” (Ilyenkov 1997, p. 9). Thus Ilyenkov’s core interest in Spinoza was not
the primacy of affects and supremacy of body over consciousness and speculation. His
continuous appeal to Spinoza was in that Spinoza discovered the specific capacity of the
body: the body that thinks is affected outwardly and experiences this affectation in
conformity with external objective facts. As Ilyenkov argues, just as it is impossible to find
the meaning for the liver’s secretion within it, it is wrong to search for the nature of thought
by examining the spatial structure of a thinking body itself. Simply because thought “is not
where it is”, quite as the meaning of the liver’s secretion is not within the liver (Ilyenkov
1997, p.11).

Thus, it is crucial that the mode of action of a thinking body is determined by the form of
things external to it and not by the immanent structure of the body. To prove this assumption
Ilyenkov’s brings the example of a human hand, “the proper form of which is not at all
reflected in the hand’s mode of action among external bodies”, the contours of which it traces
– e.g. a circle, triangle, or any other figure (Ilyenkov 1997, p.11).

Hence, it is not the forms of things that cause any shift inside the physicality of the brain –
and, by this token, thought is an inward psychic process. On the contrary, thought realizes
itself in coordination with externalized spatiality by means of being entangled in outward
objecthood. This is the reason why Ilyenkov so often recklessly uses the notion of the
“thinking body” instead of Spinoza’s Substance. This externalized nature of thought meant,
for Ilyenkov, that thinking is not an internal process evolving inside the brain, but it is the
result of external action exerted on objects and things. For Ilyenkov, this is extremely
important because it means that thought is material – but its materiality is not confined to
elemental micro-changes within the physiology of brain. Thinking can only function due to
being placed outside itself, as the activity enacted in the spacing of other things and bodies –
according to the schemes and arrangement of external thinghood and not according to its own
internal arrangement (formal semiological realization of thinking), or as a result of organic
procedures (e.g. brain, neurons, etc.). Consequently, the human being – i.e. a thinking body –
can define itself only in accordance with the forms, shapes and contours of other external
bodies, and not in accordance with the construction of “its” own body (its own self) (Ilyenkov
1984, p. 54).

However, the question here is whether Spinoza’s monist correspondence of mind and
extension and their co-extensity is compatible with the Hegelian quid pro quo principle – the

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determination of something by means of an other being, which was so crucial for Ilyenkov. 7
It is true that the material being, which is co-extensive to thought in Spinoza, is external in
relation to a thinking mind – the stance that is important for Ilyenkov to argue for the
objectivity and materiality of thought. But Hegel’s quid pro quo dialectical logic (Maidansky
2014, p. 132) is expressly different from Spinoza’s monist ‘parallelism’ (Della Rocca), in that
Hegel’s “other than itself” implies dialectical indiscreetness and the overlapping of many
“other selves”, be they mental or material. Whereas Spinoza’s being, on the one hand, and
thought, on the other, construct co-extensive chains when each attribute – mental or material
– forms its own succession and is not reciprocal with the other, simply because it is already
immanent to it. These chains form themselves in discreet connectivity, and not in
augmentable convergence and dialectical reciprocity, contradiction and superimposition. We
would agree with Alexander Surmava that Spinoza’s monism is undoubtable for Ilyenkov
(Surmava 2018). Yet, even though Ilyenkov calls Spinoza’s monism dialectical in his
“Dialectical Logic”, he, nevertheless, acknowledges that Spinoza’s body that thinks is not yet
a laboring body, i.e. it is not yet the body inscribed in activity in Marxist sense. Spinoza’s
materialism is not yet able to see human being as a Subject of labor (Ilyenkov 1997, 19). In
his “Three Centuries of Immortality” Ilyenkov emphasizes that Spinoza develops common
logic for both - the plane of ideas and the plane of things, which are in concert with each
other. But the identification of these two planes, as Ilyenkov argues, could be attained only
much later through materialist dialectics (Ilyenkov 1977).

Indeed, the questions about the compatibility between Ilyenkov’s adherence to Spinoza and
his adherence to Hegel’s dialectics, respectively, arise when it comes to the type of mediation
between body and mind. The immanence of Spinoza’s Substance rests in the positing of its
attributes as spatially locatable, topologized and quantified. In Spinoza, thought is co-
extensive with spatial bodies and things, as it forms the same chain (series) as the things do.
But the chain’s function (episteme) is accidental, performative and structured as
“concatenation” (Spinoza 1954, 98); it does not need a dialectical structure of augmentation
grounded in an irreversible and unquantifiable evolutionary process. In other words, neither
of these chains (of things/bodies or of thought) requires purposefulness or the growth and
transformation of quantity into quality. For Spinoza, accidental and contingent modes of
development have no irreversibility determined by the accumulative power of a concrete
stage of a cycle; they do not “ascend” into an irreversible stage. The elements aggregate in
their accidentality (performatively), without acquiring a new “critical mass” via dialectical
procedure.

7
The term quid pro quo was used by Andrey Maidansky in relation to Ilyenkov’s treatment of
Hegelian principle of Anderssein (Maidansky 2014, p. 132).

12
 13

In his Hegel or Spinoza (1979), Pierre Macherey insightfully emphasizes the same condition
in Spinoza; namely that, for him, the real things of being cannot ascend to abstract things or
universals. Causal orders of being and of thinking are both of the same necessity within
Substance, but “between ideas and things there exists no relationship or correspondence that
subordinates one to the other, but rather a causal identity, that establishes each one of them in
necessity of its order” (Macherey 2011, p. 64). Consequently, Spinoza’s system is not
evolutionary, unlike that of Ilyenkov’s (or of Hegel’s and Marx’s).

In his glossary on Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze emphasizes likewise, that for Spinoza there is no
convergence of mind and body. They are autonomous and depend on two different attributes,
“each attribute is being conceived through itself. But there is nevertheless a correspondence
between the two, because God, as a single substance possessing all the attributes, does not
produce anything without producing it in each attribute according to one and the same order”
(Deleuze 1988, p.87).

The achievement of such semiological discreetness, according to Deleuze, lies in the defiance
of the possibility of eminence or superiority of one attribute or modus emerging over the
other, of the “creator” over the “created” bodies, and of the perfect parameters vanquishing
the imperfect ones. (Deleuze 1988, p.88).

This ban of eminence is very important in constructing a proper immanence. The equal
valence and parallelism of the attributes prevents the mind’s prevalence over the body
(Deleuze 1988, p.18-20).

Badiou remarks on the same premise in Spinoza: “Causality organizes in God all finite things
in infinite chains. But finite things are only in relation with finite things” (Badiou 2011, p.45).
The main consequence of this is that infinite being and the becoming of finite things cannot
overlap. They need not overlap simply because infinity is guaranteed by Substance. But
precisely such exigency of overlapping of the finite and the infinite was implied in the
concept of the ideal for Ilyenkov. Thus, Spinoza does not say that outward material
externality is already capable of producing thought, but that it is just immanent to thought.
(As will be further demonstrated, to embody thought by means of figurated images and
objecthood one needs the plane of geometry in Spinoza’s system).

While Deleuze overtly posits impossibility to discern any dialectics in Spinoza, Piere
Macherey makes an effort in the last two pages of his book to inscribe Spinoza in the realm of
dialectics (Macherey 2011, pp. 212-13). He alleges that Spinoza would definitely refute the
Hegelian dialectics, (which is posited by Macherey rather as idealism than as any dialectical

13
 14

method), but not Marx’s materialist dialectics. Hegel is thus extracted from Macherey’s
interpretation of proper dialectics, which should function “in the absence of all guarantees,
without a prior orientation that would establish within it the principle of absolute negativity,
without the promise that all contradictions in which it engages are resolved”. (Macherey
2011, p. 213). Yet the question remains, whether the dialectical method that calls for the
complete denouncement of Hegel’s technique of dialectical speculation can be considered
sustainable.
Bearing in mind Ilyenkov’s emphasis on the interdependence of Marx’s and Hegel’s
dialectics, Macherey would have interpreted Ilyenkov’s understanding of materialist
dialectics, or his theory of the material ideal as “Hegelian evolutionism” or even idealism; as,
for Ilyenkov, purposefulness, and diachronic predetermination of social, economic and
cultural phenomena, are part and parcel of materialist dialectics. And in the absence of
teleology and diachronic evolutionism of social phenomena, it would be difficult to regard
Spinoza’s method as dialectical.

Gregor Moder’s “Spinoza and Hegel” is another interesting endevour to find intersections
between Hegel and Spinoza. Moder interpretes Hegel’s tellos as rather the “punctuation
mark”, or a turning point, than a full-fledged metaphysical purpose (Moder 2017, 81);
whereas Spinoza’s Substance is endowed with “torsion” and “turning point” (Moder 2017,
p.143). In that case Spinoza’s “substance without imperfections” is seen through the lens of
“capability of event and turn” and the internal purpose of change (Moder 2017, p.100). A
similar approach is applied by Moder to discover the traces of negativity in Spinoza: if we
infer that there are two types of negativity – the simple negativity, (confined to mere limits of
existence), and the constitutive/productive one (the one that implies the capability to
transform itself) (Moder 2011, p. 128), then it will be possible to assume that Spinoza’s
Substance (quite like Hegel’s Spirit) exerts this latter constitutive type of inner negativity
(Moder 2011, p.130). With such an assumption at hand, it becomes possible, as Moder
argues, to discern affinities between Hegel and Spinoza. Meanwhile, little is said in the book
on the dialectical potentiality of Spinozism; as the affinities between the two thinkers are
mainly sought in the attempt to discern Hegelian teleology and negativity in Spinoza’s
Substance.

The analysis which most thoroughly compares the peculiarities of Ilyenkov’s dialectical
methods of converging thought and matter and the Spinozist ones, belongs to Vesa Oittinen.
In an approach similar to Macherey, Oittinen emphasizes that although thought and material
extension are immanent to each other, these attributes can only be “conceived through their
own selves”. This is precisely why these two attributes – matter and thought – can be

14
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performatively coordinated (concatenated) by Spinoza in their discreet being and they need
not fuse (Oittinen 2015, p.117); 8

Oittinen writes:

In Spinoza this tertium datur, which unites thought and matter was the Substance, in Hegel it
was the Spirit, and for Ilyenkov it is the concept of activity (labor). […] For Spinoza, the
corporis actio and mentis actio were parallel yet clearly different forms of action which did
not exert any influence upon one another in the modal world.” (Oittinen 2015, p. 188).

Oittinen reminds us that when Spinoza applies geometry and imagination (geometric
spatialization of the otherwise non-spatial products of mind), they are not identical with
thinghood. But spatialization of the concept into geometry or images, and the usage of
representation for Spinoza, as Oittinen reiterates, are needed for thought to assist thought as
auxilia intellectus (auxiliary media of thought). The intellect needs the assistance of the
medium of imagination and thereby it produces fictitious geometric figuration, simply
“because mental figures are discernible only in imagination; in pure thought the geometric
relations have no parts or distances” (Oittinen 2015, p.120). Imagination is used as a
topological plane for otherwise mental and speculative phenomena, which are transposed
there into semiological expression. This act geometrically and semiologically marks mental
phenomena. But such geometricized signs do not need to overlap or identify with material
objects, simply because signs of different modi and order are already equivocal without any
convergence. This means that here it is important to keep the self-sufficient autonomy of the
selves in place; everything should be of its own kind, rather than “other of itself”. Things
have their own topological expression and accidental and performative evocation; they do not
need to blur in qualitative transition and growth, nor be subject to dialectical augmentation.

To conclude, Ilyenkov borrows from Spinoza his determination to posit thought not as
abstracted category but as the capacity of the active human body. This means that thought is
constructed not in accordance with brain procedures or any internal “spiritual” procedures,
but through its being formed out of the interaction with the constellation of outward material
things and bodies. (Ilyenkov 1997, p.10). Through such a standpoint Ilyenkov asserts that
thought is not self-sufficient but can only be conceived due to and by means of other material
beings and other selves. Yet, in Spinoza’s method there would be no need for the qualitative

8
“There cannot be any causal relation between ideas as forms of thought and the external forms of
things, and Spinoza says this so clearly that there is no room for any misinterpretations: ‘Body cannot
determine mind to think. Neither can mind determine body to motion or rest or any state different from
these’. This is not possible for the simple reason that the modes of thought have God as their cause
insofar he is a thinking thing; ‘[t]hat, therefore, which determines the mind to thought is a mode of
thought and not a mode of extension’” (Oittinen 2015, p.117).

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growth of material components into ideas and concepts, or their convergence, as they are
already co-extensive and congruent with each other.

If we now refer to the experience that Ilyenkov gained at the Zagorsk experimental school for
deaf and blind children, in collaboration with its founders, the psychologists and pedagogues
Alexander Mescheryakov and Ivan Sokolyanski, we will witness an insistent appeal to
converge matter and thought, make them incommensurably overlap with each other. The
archival footage of medical studies accompanying the pedagogical experiments of the school,
confirm how the purely haptic, manual and sensual means of a body – sometimes simply a
touch of the hand – can directly translate for the deaf and blind into thinking and the
perception of culture and art, communication, and more generally, into the view of world and
9
history, i.e. into Bildung. The footage documenting the Zagorsk school experiments
demonstrates that, what at first sight seems affective, sensual – the way the deaf and blind
students manually explore the contours of things, or communicate via haptic touch – is in fact
a process of comprehension, speculation, reflection: i.e., procedures of thinking and
conceptualization. These experiments were confirmation for Ilyenkov that human activity
exerts thinking and sociality already on the level of raw materiality.10 Even material activity,
then, such as material labor and the production of tools is thought-oriented, noumenal and
conceptual (Ilyenkov 1984, p. 99).

Hence, this case proves that thought is generated even before and without the above-
mentioned intermediary plane of geometrization and semiologization indispensable for
Spinoza to transmit thought in the form of ocular abstraction. Even without the ocular
parameters of mediation, the Weltanschauung and general image of the world still remain
possible. By consequence, signs and language are only a means – complementing the already
existing noumenal potentiality of matter. The noumenal potentiality of matter exists
irrespective of language.

Activity (Ilyenkov’s deyatel’nost) and the medium of labor permeate every immaterial
phenomenon, and vice versa – thought is potentially inscribed in every physical act. So
instead of Spinoza’s plateau of imagination added to the attributes of mind and matter as a
geometric plane to concatenate them, activity and labor exert the dialectical convergence of
mind and matter by means of an unquantifiable incommensurable procedure. Labor and

9
The footage can be seen in a recent documentary by Emanuel Almborg “Talking heads”, 2016.
10
For the interpretations of Activity Theory in Soviet philosophy See The Practical Essence of Man.
‘The Activity Approach’ in Late Soviet Philosophy. Ed. Andrey Maidansky, Vesa Oittinen. Historical
Materialism series. Haymarket books, 2017; and A. Leontiev’s Activity and Consciousness, 1975
(Leontiev 2009).

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 17

activity contain performative elements, but they are not confined to topological presences in
separate acts of performance. Labor (activity) becomes the logic for the fusion of both
thought/act and material objecthood. For Ilyenkov, convergence of the abstract and the
concrete is not placeable although it takes place with concrete functions and outcomes: the
spoon is concrete and material, but at the same time it is wholly general and ideal in being the
part of the productive and social relations; this holds the dialectics of its genesis ever open.
For a dialectician, then, the immanentist equation of idea and matter by means of geometry
and topologization remains abstract, despite its nominalist, hic et nunc parameters.

Andrey Maidansky, who also explored the role of Spinozism in Soviet Marxist thought, has to
acknowledge (in the same vein as Oitinnen) that although for Spinoza “practical action
defines human intellect”, matter and practice do not directly create or generate intellect in his
system (Maidansky 2003, p. 209). Intellect processes the data delivered from imagination in
Spinoza’s system; but imaginative acts operate differently from the laws and operations of
intellect (Maidansky 2003, p. 206). Meanwhile, Ilyenkov perservered in his attempt to prove
that body and bodily states were able to generate (or transform) the human mind (intellect) by
means of activity and labor (Maidansky 2003, p. 204). In this case, the principal point is the
finite, object-based characteristics of the ideal, finiteness of the universal parameters
(finiteness of the infinite). The ideal (infiniteness) operates materially as mundane objecthood
inscribed and reverberated in social activity; and materiality, in its own turn, acquires
noumenal and eidetic qualities.
The Spinozist condition was that finite things apriori have an infinite God as their immanent
cause; hence, the finite and the infinite need not mingle. Finite things can only be created by
finite things and be connected to finite things. Infinity under such conditions is possible only
as the infinity of the chain of finite things in infinite chains (Badiou 2011, pp. 39-51). But
Ilyenkov’s discovery – his insistence on claiming the factual, material dimension of the ideal
– was that finite things operate as infinite not only in the continuity of deep cosmic eternity.
On the contrary, physical things - simultaneously with their nominal finite materiality – can
function as noumenal, ideal, extra-physical, (i.e. the ideal could be imagined as having a finite
form and vice versa, a physical object can be seen as infinite and general within sociality).
This is because, as argued above, the materialist dimension of the ideal is realized for
Ilyenkov through capacity of a thing to determine other things (e. g. the value form reveals
the relations of production, a word determines an object, or an object represents its genesis as
labor activity). Whereas Spinoza would not need to determine the selves through the other-
selves.

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Such complexities in reconciling the materialism of the ideal with Spinoza’s studies of
Substance reside in the task that Ilyenkov sets himself, conjoining Hegelian and Marxian
dialectics, on the one hand, and Spinoza’s non-idealist immanentism, on the other. The reason
for those complexities is due to the fact that both Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics rely on the
principles of development and augmentation. Dialectics as a procedure surpasses discrete
particulars – the accidentalities, contingencies and topologies – thus making the arrival at the
stage of labor crucial and irreversible.

4. The Noumenal Dimension of the Marxist Political Economy

Ilyenkov’s theory of the ideal hinges on the Marxist political economy and the politico-
economic conditions of communism. These conditions presuppose that the objects of use, the
things of the material world, acquire the status of epiphenomena: they are not commodities
any more, or the objects of consumption. Even if such objects could be perceived as being
“imperfect” from the point of view of commodity logic, they can be regarded as ideal
socially. As Ilyenkov states in his “The Question of Identity of Thought and Being in Pre-
marxist Philosophy”, without the Marxist-Leninist theory of reflection “the identification (i.e.
identity as an act, action, process, not as an inert state) of thought and reality, that is
accomplished in practice”, would be impossible (Ilyenkov 1997, 25). In other words,
according to Ilyenkov, “the identification” of the noumenal and material parameters is “the
very essence and substance” of the Marxist-Leninist theory. Crucial for such an identification
is the capacity of material objects to acquire noumenal features. Why? Because the eidetic,
generic, basic function of a material thing manifests itself at its best in a de-privatized
economy and due to the sequestered surplus value in economic production. Ilyenkov confirms
that it is the process of the non-alienated, de-privatized social and labor relations that enables
for the produced object to acquire generic social impact, and by this token, to engender the
reproduction of the ideal in the sociality. That said he adds the following tenet:
“If then, as Marx remarked, this process were to stop even for a week, then not only the ideal
but also the person as the subject of ideal activity would disappear” (Ilyenkov 1962).

This means that simply an object or a thing as such, in its literal being, is not ideal. It is ideal
only in the system of sociality, where it determines the other thing and is determined by other
thing. Thus, a thing can inevitably become ideal when it enters the system of labor relations,
and reveals the relations of production and sociality of life, and hence it is not confined to its
nominal literal thinghood. Yet it has to be noted, that in capitalist sociality - with its distortion
of the relations of production, extremities in the division of labor and with the undermined
continuity between the sign and the thing (i.e. in the conditions of the utmost modes of
abstraction and alienation) – the chance to consider the object-based social activity

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(production) as the ideal – diminishes.

And indeed, as Ilyenkov asserts: “Marxism also takes into account the fact that, under
conditions of the division of labor and the alienation of thought, the transformation of being
into thought and thought into being takes place via an extremely complex prism of mediations
that is of a purely social nature” (Ilyenkov 1997, 25). By this assertion, Ilyenkov emphasizes,
that capitalist political economy hampers the possibility of converging thought and being.

The fact that scissors cut, or that bread feeds and plates are used for food – constructs both the
material and social purpose of objecthood, as well as its conceptual expediency. Things are
inventions, i.e. they are seen in general terms. Not only social infrastructure changes with a
de-privatized economy, but also the conditions of operation of material objects and their
function. So that, what seemed to be natural qualities in the existence of a thing turns out to
be the outcome of social infrastructure, modes of production and political economy. This
means that the political economy of de-privatization might entail transformation of the very
factuality of existence and consequently, transform the methods of epistemology.

In his letter titled O polozhenii s filosofiei (On the Situation with Philosophy), which Ilyenkov
addressed to the Central Commitee of the Communist Party (Ilyenkov 1960’s), he shares his
worries about the insufficient influence of philosophy in Soviet socialism. In this letter
Ilyenkov urges the Central Committee to increase the influence of Marxist and Leninist
norms in philosophy: to his mind Marxist political economy should have an even bigger
impact on philosophy, and vice versa - socialist society should be more deeply permeated by
philosophic epistemology departing from Marxist standpoints11 . Marx’s dialectical method
and political economy had to be more productively applied to Soviet sociality, science and
culture, in order to avoid collapse into pure empiricism. According to Ilyenkov, it was Marx
who proved that political economy could be the field of philosophic epistemology.
Consequently, socialist production and political economy could become the polygon of
philosophic speculation – a stance that proved that embodying Marxist political economy in
social life could pave the way to studies of the dialectical convergence of thought and being.
Ilyenkov reveals this method in practice when, in his The Abstract and the Concrete, he
considers the socialist political economy epistemologically and speculatively, and vice versa
– when he shows how idea and notions are being translated into concrete social and politico-
economic phenomena (Ilyenkov 1960).

11
Arto Artinian mentions this letter in a similar context in his paper “Radical Currents in Soviet
Philosophy: Lev Vygotsky and Evald Ilyenkov” (Artinian 2017, 95-121). Ilyenkov’s ideas about
Marx’s philosophic gnoseology and epistemic change of knowledge and cognition after revolution
were developed as early as in 1954-55 (Ilyenkov 1955, 144-210).

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The above-mentioned letter to the Central Committee confirms Ilyenkov’s conviction that in
the after-revolutionary socialist society the non-capitalist political economy begins to “define
the criteria, basis and goal of being and cognition” (Ilyenkov, 1960-s). By consequence,
concrete daily sociality, the objecthood and physical existence become burdened by the
ideational parameters, so that the regime of noumenal procedures construct practical life,
material objecthood and their forms. In this case thought resides right in the frame of social
materiality which is able to acquire the status of the ideal (the universal, the general); whereas
the ideal in its own turn, starts to operate and function in the daily social production.
As Ilyenkov writes, “the materialist understanding of the ideal becomes natural for someone
in a communist society where culture does not oppose the individual as something externally
assigned, something autonomous and alien but is a form of one’s own dynamic activity”
(Ilyenkov 1962, 127).

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