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Il’enkov’s Hegel

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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, incarcerated 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.

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Notes

  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.

  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).

  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.

  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.

  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.”

  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.

  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).

  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.

  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.”

  17. For further discussion of this theme see Bakhurst (2012).

  18. Some of these articles (e.g. “Materializm voinstvujuščij—znachit dialetičeskij” [“Militant materialism 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.

  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).

  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.

  24. Bukharin ends Philosophical arabesques with the words, “New questions of world significance are ripening, questions of the worldwide victory of socialism and its youthful culture, full of the joys of life” (376).

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Bakhurst, D. Il’enkov’s Hegel. Stud East Eur Thought 65, 271–285 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-014-9187-0

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