Ewald Iljenkow: Sacrificing humanity to save lots of the universe | EUROtoday

Marxism has a energy and a weak point: it presents a convincing evaluation of capitalist economics, however on the identical time its philosophy of historical past results in a utopian useless finish. Marx believed that revolutions have been the “locomotives of history.” In the classless society, humanity will finish its “prehistory” and attain paradise on earth. Ironically, a satisfied Marxist within the first “workers and farmers state” challenged this perception.

The Soviet thinker Ewald Ilyenkov (1924–1979) got here into battle with the authorities exactly due to his uncompromising utility of Marxism to the philosophy of historical past. As a younger Red Army soldier, he took half within the conquest of Berlin. The struggle expertise traumatized him severely. Nevertheless, the destroyed capital appeared to him as a paradigmatic place of thought. A photograph reveals artillery lieutenant Ilyenkov at Hegel’s grave. It is feasible that Ilyenkov primarily based his cosmological hypothesis on the long run exactly on this dialectic of the useless thinker and the residing world spirit.

After finding out philosophy at Moscow University, Ilyenkov took up a place on the Academy of Sciences. However, he repeatedly got here into battle with the official ideology: he was alternately accused of being a Gnostic or an idealist. In the Seventies, Ilyenkov was concerned within the so-called “Zagorsk Experiment,” which was devoted to the upbringing and schooling of deaf-blind kids. The social integration of individuals with tough sensory entry to the skin world corresponded to Ilyenkov’s central credo: considering isn’t a product of the person mind, however exists as a supra-individual type of matter. Ilyenkov was finally now not capable of come to phrases along with his place as a heretic within the dogma of official Soviet Marxism. In 1979 he opened his carotid artery with a knife.

Ilyenkov was each a consultant and a challenger of Soviet tradition. An early testimony to this ambivalence is his treatise “Cosmology of Spirit,” which is now accessible in German within the terminologically exact translation by Isabel Jacobs. In their insightful introduction, Martin Küpper and Sascha Freyberg present how Ilyenkov’s strategy enters right into a dialogue with the up to date actuality of nuclear weapons and house expeditions.

The “Cosmology of Spirit” couldn’t seem throughout Ilyenkov’s lifetime. The subject was too grandiose, the argumentation too daring and the baroque subtitle too in depth: “An attempt to determine in general terms the objective role of thinking matter in the system of universal interaction (a philosophical-poetic phantasmagoria based on the principles of dialectical materialism)”.

Ilyenkov advocates two theses in his essay. First, he claims that there isn’t any thought with out matter, simply as there isn’t any matter with out thought. Secondly, Ilyenkov radically rejects the concept of ​​a starting and an finish to historical past, as a result of in any other case one must assume a creator God with apocalypse or the Big Bang with entropy loss of life. But that may be a negation of the power that’s inherent in considering.

And so Ilyenkov polemicizes towards Friedrich Engels’ gloomy imaginative and prescient from the “Dialectics of Nature”: Here, a frozen, useless earth in ever narrower orbits lastly crashes onto the chilly solar. As an avowed Marxist, Ilyenkov celebrates, quite the opposite, the start of the classless society, wherein humanity’s willingness to make sacrifices is already predetermined. In a couple of million years, the human neighborhood will exterminate itself in an act of self-sacrifice as a way to rebirth matter in a brand new cosmic cycle. Ilyenkov conjures up a “fiery vapor-like state in which all elements are transformed into wildly circling vortices” as the last word combination state of “thinking matter”.

Slavoj Žižek mentioned that on this spectacle the best “madness of dialectical materialism” was reached. It is extra possible, nevertheless, that Ilyenkov describes in his “philosophical-poetic phantasmagoria” the unconditional will for thought to perpetuate itself in view of the transience of matter.

Ewald Wassiljewitsch Ilyenkow: “Cosmology of the Spirit”. Translated from Russian by Isabel Jacobs. Edited by Martin Küpper and Sascha Freyberg. Matthes & Seitz Verlag, Berlin 2026. 126 pages, br., €12.