Review by Corinna Lotz

First published by Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

Bakhurst plays a kind of devil’s advocate, pausing mid-book to ask: ‘Ilyenkov is long dead. Philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience and evolutionary biology have been busy – very busy – in the intervening years. So why dwell on a thinker like Ilyenkov, who is so remote from the contemporary scene?’ (285)

The answers come thick and fast in The Heart of the Matter, a compilation of essays chronicling Bakhurst’s 30-year intellectual journey, which begins by presenting thinkers who were terra incognita for non-Russian readers – until, that is, his groundbreaking Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (1991).

He first encountered Soviet psychologist Felix Mikhailov (1930-2006) in 1980 on a student trip to Moscow. Mikhailov soon became a soulmate, and it is to him that this book is dedicated. It was through him that Bakhurst came to know philosophers Vladimir Bibler, Vladislav Lektorsky and psychologist Vasily Davydov. All of them had ‘come out from under Ilyenkov’s overcoat’, as the saying went (193). Mikhailov was a direct connection with Evald Ilyenkov, who had died by his own hand the year before Bakhurst first arrived in Moscow.

The group were a link to the early Soviet period of philosophy and psychology, which included Valentin Voloshinov (1895-1936), who argued against crude socio-economic explanations while asserting the social constitution of individual memory, and Lev Vygotsky, whose writings were systematically suppressed after his death in 1934 under Stalin’s rule. These legacies ‘could only be preserved in an oral culture sustained by their followers’, Bakhurst writes, often by the Kharkiv school (77).

Given the repressive political conditions under which they lived and worked, their thought ‘was preserved in a collective memory under extraordinary constraints and pressures, paramount among which was that the nature of the process of remembering could never be explicit in the memories it yielded. The memory of their tradition suffered from amnesia about its own history’ (67).

Bakhurst puts paid to the notion that Vygotsky’s references to Marx and Engels were simply paying lip service to state dogma, describing his method as fundamentally dialectical as ‘everything must be understood in its development’ (214). For Vygotsky, the transition from lower to higher mental functions involves a transformation through the intervention of an outside stimulus or an artificial mediational device. His powerful insight was that ‘through others we become ourselves’ (217).

The chapters ‘On the Concept of Mediation’ and ‘Vygotsky’s Concept of Perezhivanie’, published here in English for the first time, defend the understanding that ‘thought can embrace an independent world’ (240). Mediation is seen as critical in the formation of a child’s subjectivity: ‘at the core of the self’s dialogical essence lies the fact that the self emerges as self-for-another’ (245).

The fascinating mysteries of the relationship between the individual and the social and the formation of personality are unravelled in a transcription of a discussion about social being and human essence between Mikhailov, Bibler, Lektorsky, Davydov and Bakhurst himself. He discovered that informal discussions ‘in the kitchen’ were creative and free in contrast to what could be said in public.

In now legendary events, two firebrand students rocked the academic establishment with their Theses on Philosophy, presented in 1954. Emboldened by Stalin’s death in March 1953, Ilyenkov and Valentin Korovikov derided the official view that meant ‘reducing philosophy itself to a parade of examples illustrating things long known’ (116), thus discrediting philosophy, as they stated in their Theses on Philosophy. Instead, the objects of philosophy were the logical categories of scientific thought, its activity, laws, and historical development. The theses heralded a life-long struggle by Ilyenkov against the reduction of philosophy to sterile dogmas. Ilyenkov now became ‘a key figure in the revival of Russian Marxist philosophy after the dark days of Stalinism’.

Ilyenkov’s doctoral dissertation, The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital, was a work of epistemology, developing Marx’s method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete (133). His 1962 Encyclopedia article ‘The Ideal’ was written to focus on a ‘human world laden with ideality’, with a new emphasis on the formation of the individual.

In ‘Meaning, Normativity and the Life of the Mind’, Bakhurst explores Ilyenkov’s Ideal as an objective, dialectical part of an already humanised nature, where ‘we inhabit a world made significant, or “idealised” by human agency, and the objects of nature speak to us in so far as they are incorporated into this domain of meaning’. But this domain of meaning, the ‘enchanted world’, is not situated within the human brain or indeed purely in a mental sphere. It is the sphere of humanised nature, ‘merged together with the surrounding world’ (138).

Ilyenkov’s championing of social human culture is especially relevant in our age of artificial intelligence and algorithmic controls, especially his opposition to ‘brainism’ (282), the one-dimensional reduction of mind to physiological brain function (166). As against biological determinism, he insisted that ‘everything human in human beings […] is 100% the result of the social development of human society’ (168).

Ilyenkov proposed that a child’s development into ‘a thinking subject as a self-development, self-becoming […] through the appropriation of culture’, was through her own powers of self-transformation (170). He also subscribed to the view that there are ‘“objective contradictions” or contradictions in reality, as well as within the realm of thought’.  In his article ‘Schools must teach how to think’, he stressed the importance of teaching students not to fear contradiction (n22, 171, 172).

Bakhurst remarks that it was precisely ideas inspired by Hegel that got Ilyenkov into trouble with the Stalinist ideological controllers. What angered them was that Ilyenkov drew from Hegel’s dialectic the need to investigate thought’s relation to its objects, to question and challenge what was, not to accept things as they were. His summary of what Ilyenkov drew from Hegel includes the controversial notion ‘that contradiction is central to understanding the movement of thought’ and ‘there can be “objective contradictions”’ (200). It is above all in the definition of the ‘ideal world’ seen as the objectification of human activity that Ilyenkov ‘coincides’ with Hegel. For Ilyenkov, logical forms are ‘universal forms of the development of reality outside thought’ (202).

Commissioned to commemorate Lenin’s 1908 book Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Ilyenkov saw a chance to reaffirm his fundamental concept of philosophy – as the ‘identity of logic, dialectics and the theory of knowledge’, aligning with the view expressed by Lenin in his notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic (198).  Bakhurst says that, in Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism, his last book, Ilyenkov is ‘unquestionably to be faulted for his uncritical reconstruction of Lenin as philosopher’ (205).  Lenin’s tough style of writing set a model, Bakhurst claims, for the repressive ‘culture’ that Ilyenkov had set himself against. However, this is unjust to both Lenin (and Ilyenkov, for that matter) who should not be held responsible for the crimes of Stalinism. Those were the product of a counter-revolution in which Lenin’s old comrades were executed. Lenin’s book is a polemic against members of his own party who were rejecting materialism and embracing subjectivism.

Leninist Dialectics was above all an outcry against the technocratic and anti-humanist dogmas being peddled in the Soviet Union. In his memoirs, Mikhailov, who read the proofs before publication, said that Ilyenkov sought to denounce the whole state machine which he saw as an ‘ugly incarnation of the dream of technocrats’. He gave himself a protective cloak by drawing a continuity with Lenin’s critique of positivism.

Examining the relationship between social and individual (268), Bakhurst discusses Jerome Bruner’s work. In a nicely ironic comment, he notes that ‘the idea that the mind organises experience has led us down the well-trodden path to global irrealism. The resulting position is fashionable, particularly when endowed with post-modern flourishes’ (271).

Looking at parallels between analytical philosophers and affinities between Ilyenkov and contemporary philosopher John McDowell, Bakhurst suggests that both seek to erode the opposition between mind and world by portraying the world we encounter in experience as made for ‘the exercise of our conceptual powers’. (154) He describes this as ‘the space of reasons’, giving Ilyenkov’s Ideal a more rationalist, normative interpretation. He sees a commonality in that these very different philosophers share a moral requirement and the aspiration for human flourishing to be ‘at home in the world’. Building on the social-historical concept of the human mind, Bakhurst sees a commonality between McDowell and Ilyenkov’s work on the Ideal. Discussing notions of experience and perception, he says that both seek to ‘re-enchant’ reality to resolve the problem of how mind relates to ‘external’ realms (273).

In ‘Reflections on Activity Theory’, Bakhurst asks if Ilyenkov is offering a ‘speculative anthropology’ or a ‘transcendental deduction of the subject-object relation, in which the concept of activity plays an absolutely crucial role’. (310). The challenge of making ‘thought accountable to reality; not just to reality as we see it but to reality as it is’ (312) is indeed a burning issue. To help solve this, Bakhurst proposes a ‘Wittgensteinian reading’ in which ‘the world we confront is alive with significance; it embodies meaning, value and reasons, while, Ilyenkov adds a stronger idea: in virtue of the objective existence of such properties, the world is a possible object of thought’ (149). But this does not undermine the ‘basic realism that is a feature of our practices as we live them’ (153).

To address such issues, I suggest Hegel’s ‘determinations of reflection’ making use of Lenin’s notes on them, interpreted through an Ilyenkovian lens, can facilitate an understanding of human cognition, as a mental-physical journey. Taking on the lacunae in Ilyenkov’s work would benefit by exploring Hegel’s concept of ‘Aufhebung’ or negation (also translated as sublation), as vital in the complex transitions between the realm of ‘the causal, the natural, the nomological’ (273). This aspect of dialectics, like contradiction, does not appear in Bakhurst’s interpretation.

Thus, in my view, moving from the physical world to the ‘space of reason’ aka the Ideal, involves a ‘negation’ or leap from the ‘un-enchanted’ to the ‘enchanted’, mediated through an individual being living within social human culture. There is a hint of this in Bakhurst’s note about Ilyenkov’s remark that ‘a human being thinks with the help of her brain’ (282). We learn that the etymology of the Russian word chelovek suggests a being whose ‘face is turned towards the infinite’ (282, n2), thus giving the expression a more universal significance. Thus, being human involves a propensity to be able to embrace universals, which subsist in a new and different form within the individual. In the dialectical path from this ‘infinite’, there is a moment of ‘not being’ in the sense that the space of reason or mind, or Ilyenkov’s Ideal, involves moments of ‘non-existent which nonetheless exists’, Lenin’s aphorism paraphrasing Hegel’s analysis of Semblance in the Science of Logic.

Bakhurst makes a convincing case that these Soviet thinkers can enrich Anglo-Saxon analytical traditions, in line with his conviction that ‘it is very good for philosophers to be forced to immerse themselves in alien styles of thought and forge a meeting of minds’ (XI). Bakhurst illuminates potentially dry arguments with amusing examples from everyday experiences, deconstructing excessive complexity.  His deep admiration for the people he met in his student days shines through with an attractive personal touch.

He has provided an indispensable connection with a world of philosophical practice not only in the former Soviet Union and Ukraine, revealing their contribution and as well as their historicity. In the past year, symposia and publications marked the centenary of Ilyenkov’s birth, evidence of a remarkable renaissance in Ilyenkov studies. At a time when the masters of Big Tech and far-right authoritarians seek to swamp the world with alt-truth and destroy humanist, objective forms of thought and education, taking forward the work of these thinkers is vital.

16 January 2025

---

Corinna Lotz’ book Finding Evald Ilyenkov – How a Soviet Philosopher who stood up for dialectics continues to inspire, was published by Real Democracy Movement in April 2019. She co-ordinates International Friends of Ilyenkov.