As we will see, the theme of myth—or rather a “mythology of reason”—will play a role in understanding our theme.
See Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy? (Was ist das—die Philosophie?), eds. W. Kluback and J. T. Wilde (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1958), 29–31.
Aristotle does, however, mention “self-moving marionettes,” “solstices,” and “the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with the side” as examples of objects that can provoke astonishment (Metaphysics A, 2, 983 a 19–85).
According to David Bakhurst, “Ilyenkov was important in the revival of Russian Marxist philosophy after the dark days of Stalinism. In the early 1960s, he produced significant work in two main areas. First he wrote at length on Marx's dialectical method … Second, Ilyenkov developed a distinct solution to what he called ‘the problem of the ideal’; that is, the problem of the place of the non-material in the natural world … After the insightful writings of the early 1960s, Ilyenkov’s inspiration diminished as the political climate became more oppressive … He died in 1979, by his own hand.” David Bakhurst, “Meaning, Normativity, and the Life of the Mind,” Language & Communication 17, no. 1 (January 1997): 33–51. For more on Ilyenkov, see the Marxist Internet Archive →.
See the work of David Bakhurst, Vesa Oittinen, Alex Levant, Andrei Maidansky, and Sergei Mareyev.
The first English translation of “Cosmology of the Spirit” was recently published in a special issue of the journal Stasis (vol. 5., no. 2, 2017) →.
“Cosmology of the Spirit” (Kosmologia dukha) was first published in Russian in 1988, in the journal Science and Religion.
Among these few works and commentaries, see, for example, a chapter on “Cosmology” written by Ilyenkov’s friend and student Sergei Mareyev (Sergei Mareyev, “Cosmology of Mind,” Studies in East European Thought 57, no. 3–4, 2005: 249–59). See also the deeply informed commentary of Giuliano Vivaldi, the translator of the English version of “Cosmology” published in Stasis; his commentary assembles rare sources and provides a rich context for the genealogy of the work (Giuliano Vivaldi, “A Commentary on Evald Ilyenkov’s Cosmology of the Spirit,” Stasis 5, no. 2, 2017).
See Mareyev, “Cosmology of Mind.”
See Pobisk Kuznetsov, “Once Again about the Thermal Death of the Universe and the Second Law of Thermodynamics” (1955), published in Russian at →. In this text, Kuznetsov refers directly to the work of the cosmist Vladimir Vernadsky. Another, later version of this text was indeed published as the entry on “Life” (Zhizn) in Ilyenkov’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 2. (Moscow: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1962), 133–34.
Of course, in Fedorov’s key text, The Philosophy of Common Task, women definitely play a part in the resurrection process, but this part is determined by stereotypical and patriarchal gender roles—men “hunt” for remnants of past generations, while women “give birth” to them by collecting and revitalizing them in special laboratories. However, the symbolic register of the text does not acknowledge even this—actually, essential—contribution.
Officially, Fedorov’s legacy was not welcome in the USSR, and his books were not in print during the Soviet era.
Evald Ilyenkov, “Cosmology of the Spirit,” trans. Giuliano Vivaldi, Stasis 5, no. 2 (2017): 165.
This book was unfinished and remained unpublished during Engels’s lifetime. It was published in 1925 under the direction of David Riazanov at the Moscow Marx-Engels Institute.
Vesa Oittinen, “Evald Il’enkov as an Interpreter of Spinoza,” Studies in East European Thought 57, no. 3–4 (2005): 320.
Ilyenkov, “Cosmology of the Spirit,” 166.
Ibid. Italics in the original.
Ibid., 171.
Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987), 563.
Ilyenkov, “Cosmology of the Spirit,” 177.
Ibid., 187.
Ibid., 176. This stance is definitely an implicit projection of Lenin’s interventionist politics into the realm of cosmological and ontological speculation. Lenin honed this approach in debates with Bolshevik representatives of the so-called “economist” tendency, starting with his famous text “What Is To Be Done?” (1902). The “economists” defended the idea that the conditions for the revolutionary subjectivation of the proletariat are determined by objective economic development and its natural laws. In opposition to this, Lenin emphasized the subjective intervention of party intellectuals, who have to bring radical consciousness to the working class.
While the big bang theory remains a prevailing paradigm in physics today, the theory of the thermal death or “heat death” of the universe that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and was integral to Engels’s Dialectics of Nature is not considered so influential. For example, the work of Russian-Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003), which rethinks thermodynamics and introduces the capacity of matter to “self-organize” (and not only in its biological form), proposes a new perspective on thermal death; however, Prigogine’s theories operate on the level of specific and closed systems, not on the universe as a whole, thus abandoning a central component of Ilyenkov’s thermal death hypothesis.
Ilyenkov, “Cosmology of the Spirit,” 185, 188.
Ibid., 184–85.
Ibid., 188.
Ibid., 189–90. Italics added.
For evidence of this, see the book Ilyenkov: zhit’ filosofiei (Evald Ilyenkov: To live by philosophy) by Ilyenkov’s younger colleague and friend Sergei Mareyev (Moscow: Akademitcheski Projet, 2014), 156–71.
Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript (London: Verso, 2009). See also my article “Stalin Beyond Stalin: A Paradoxical Hypothesis of Communism by Alexandre Kojève and Boris Groys,” Crisis and Critique 3, no. 1 (2016).
On real communism and negativity, see the article by Artemy Magun, “Negativity in Communism: Ontology and Politics,” Russian Sociological Review 13, no. 1 (2014). This negativity was a risky move in political polemics, as it led the most odious critics of “real socialism” to claim that the secret goal of communism was the self-destruction of humanity.
The term “Capitalocene” was introduced by Jason Moore in his book Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).
See, for example, Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (London: Belknap Press, 1998).
In his introduction to the English translation of “Cosmology,” Vivaldi summarizes some of these connections.
Evald Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic: Essays on its History and Theory (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977).
Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology (New York: SUNY Press, 2006), 87.
Of course, both Badiou and Ilyenkov are criticized for “misreading” Spinoza. See, however, a sympathetic account of Badiou’s reading in Sam Gillespie, “Placing the Void: Badiou on Spinoza,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6, no. 3 (2001).
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008), 110.
Ibid., 116.