Evald Ilyenkov (1924-1979) was one of the most important philosophers of the Soviet era. His work currently experiences a revival across the globe, with new publications, symposia and translations. Ilyenkov is a thinker who continues to pose challenges to our understanding of the world. His philosophical interests included, among others, dialectics and logic; political economy; psychology; cosmology; cybernetics; aesthetics; pedagogy; subjectivity and personhood. He is famous as the philosophical representative of cultural-historical activity theory in Soviet psychology. Long after the demise of the Soviet Union, his radical approach keeps on shaping educational and psychological orientations worldwide. As a teacher, Ilyenkov aimed to teach his students how (and not what) to think, arguing for a holistic approach that resisted automatisation and unquestioned tenets.
On the occasion of his centenary we plan an international conference in Berlin that critically reassesses and reflects on Ilyenkov’s legacy. However, our event is not just a memorial or a historical engagement. We believe that Ilyenkov’s ideas are prescient to contemporary debates on culture, society, education and science; for example the dangers posed by quantification, artificial intelligence and unrestrained capital accumulation. Celebrating Ilyenkov collectively, we want to focus on a central concern in his work: the concept of the ideal. What are ideals? What is the relation of the ideal to images and imagination? What are the radical and utopian potentialities of the ideal today? And what place does the ideal hold in materialist dialectics?
One of the most well-known texts by Ilyenkov at the time was his article “Ideal’noe” (1962) in the Soviet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – a work which exerted global influence beyond the Eastern Bloc. Ilyenkov revised the problem of ‘ideality’ along the lines of a dialectics which integrated the heritage of Hegel and Spinoza into Marxism-Leninism. Ilyenkov did not understand ideals in terms of mere abstractions, but as concrete relations. Putting the concept of ideal at the centre amounted to a scandalous attempt of revising not only the task of philosophy in Marxism-Leninism but of cognition as such. Philosophy for Ilyenkov was a critical inquiry into thinking and its development. The conceptual turn he suggested could be described as the groundwork of a functional materialism of processes, interactions and social interrelations.
Ilyenkov’s work did not only amount to a defence of philosophy but of the place of thought in a future communist society and cosmos. His conception of thinking was linked to the enactive engagement between the individual and her environment, especially in social terms. Ilyenkov tried to develop images of the ideal in different realms, such as psychology, education and science. His work on Marx’s dialectical method received wide-spread attention in the 1960s, when Ilyenkov also engaged with so-called Western Marxism. Dialectics for Ilyenkov was a way to grasp processes of idealisation, from perception and imagination to scientific modelling and cybernetics. In his book Idols and Ideals (1968), Ilyenkov engaged with the general public in a more popular way; he questioned one-sided hopes in Soviet society to build up a communist society by way of merely technological progress.
Our centenary workshop invites participants to analyse Ilyenkov’s philosophical work from a global and transdisciplinary perspective. Our focus lies on images of the ideal with regards to cognition in different fields. This core constellation revolves around concepts of the ideal in Ilyenkov’s work, while situating his legacy within contemporary debates. We also welcome more creative interventions, including film and performance.
Ilyenkov developed images of the ideal not only in his works on the history of dialectics (Spinoza, Hegel and Marx/Engels) but also in the context of different fields of knowledge. We aim to structure our event along four main clusters:
- Cognition and Psychology
- Epistemology and Technology
- The Social and the Aesthetic
- Materialism and Cosmology
Possible topics include:
- Ideality between reduction and visualisation
- Ideals in philosophy, science and society
- Relations between knowledge and activity
- Ilyenkov and recent epistemology and philosophy of science
- Ilyenkov and recent interpretations of Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, et al.
- Aesthetics and the philosophy of culture
- Universalism, emancipation and radical politics
- Socialist culture and communist ideals
- Dialectical critiques of modernism, positivism and capitalism
- Ilyenkov and new materialisms
- Cybernetics, technology and AI
- Dialectics and relational logic, systems and network theory
- Learning, care, disability studies and pedagogy
- Ilyenkov’s theory of personhood and individuality
- Enactivism and embodied cognition
- Ecosocialism and the Anthropocene
- Ilyenkov and Science Fiction
- Global reception of Soviet Marxism, East-West relations and the Cold War
- Marxism-Leninism and the Global South in the 20th and 21st century
- Ilyenkov in dialogue with other thinkers (e.g. Vygotsky, Lukács, Lifshitz, Mamardashvili, Kojève, Kosík, Žižek, Deleuze)
Organisers
Isabel Jacobs is a PhD candidate at the University of London, specialising in Soviet and French philosophy.
Martin Küpper is a PhD candidate at Kiel University and a researcher at Babes-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca), specialising in the history of materialism, dialectics and philosophy in the GDR.
Schedule
15 January 2024: Deadline for Proposals (abstract and short bio; max. 400 words in total)
15 February 2024: Notification of all applicants
Contact Info
Isabel Jacobs, i.jacobs@qmul.ac.uk
Martin Küpper, makuepper@icloud.com