Reality of the Ideal

Marxism started with a revolt against its nurse - Hegel’s philosophy. In 1845 in Brussels, as Marx remembered, he and Engels decided to ‘settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience (Gewissen)’.J The radical error of Hegelianism consists in the belief that ideas rule over the world, and the whole history of mankind is some ‘other-being’ of pure ideas. So Marx and Engels intended to turn philosophy upside down - to drive away philosophy, with its ‘drunken speculation’, from the ‘science of history’ (Wissenschaft der Geschichte), and to depict reality as it is, materialisticall

The "True religion" and the philosophical god of Spinoza

Spinoza‟s notion of „God‟ is examined in the article through prisms of: criticism of religious consciousness in „Theological-Political Treatise‟, theory of affects developed in „Ethics‟, and Spinoza‟s comments on languag

Evald Ilyenkov’s "Creative Marxism": A Review of E.V. Ilyenkov: Zhit’ Filosofiei [To Live by Philosophy] by Sergey Mareev

The latest book by Russian philosopher Sergey Mareev consists of two parts: recollections of his teacher Evald Ilyenkov, and reflections on some of the key themes of Ilyenkov’s philosophical heritage. The author traces several polemical lines related to the problem of the ideal (Ilyenkov versus Losev and Lifschitz), dialectics of the abstract and the concrete, the principle of historicism, as well as Ilyenkov’s interpretation of Spinoza and Hege

The aesthetic realism of Mikhail Lifshits: art, history and the communist ideal

The aesthetics of Mikhail Lifshits may be characterised as a quest for pravda (truth/justice) in art. The article discusses his assessment of the fate of art in the communist revolution and his view on revolution through the prism of classical art. Pondering the metaphysical foundations of his realist aesthetics, Lifshits offered a naturalistic version of the theory of reflection based on the contradistinction of "big" and "small" bein

Book review: Vygotskys notebooks: a selection

Overall, the book under review opens a new significant chapter in Vygotsky studies. His Notebooks allow and, I would even say, require us to take a new look at the history of cultural-historical psychology and provide highly valuable material for further development of this research progra

Hegel in the Mirrors of Soviet Philosophy

The attitude to Hegel in Soviet philosophy was contradictory and depended to a considerable extent on ideological conjuncture. Waves of love and hate for Hegel alternated periodically. At different times emphasis was placed on the “revolutionary” method, dialectics, or on the “reactionary” system, the justification of the old world. On one page Lenin admired Hegel’s logical discoveries, on the next page he scolded him with harsh words for idealism, mysticism and “goddikin”. The article draws a parallel between the stylistics of Lenin’s philosophical works and the avant-garde artists and poets who gave a “slap in the face” to public taste. Philosophy becomes in Lenin’s hands the servant of politics; later on, the “principle of partisanship” became the credo of Marxist dogma and the criterion of the truth of philosophical doctrines. The Hegelian wing of Soviet Marxism was formed in the 1920s. The party leader of the “Dialecticians”, Abram Deborin, initiated the publication of Hegel’s Collected Works, which was published with a number of large and small interruptions over the course of  30 years (and the last, 15th volume never saw the light of day). After the defeat of the Deborinites in 1931, Hegel’s popularity gradually declined. However, some original studies coloured by love for Hegel appeared. Vygotsky used Hegelian concepts of “mediation” and “cunning of reason” to create a cultural-historical psychology; he believed that Hegel “walked lamely to the truth”. Mikhail Lifshits regarded Hegel as a “great conservative of mankind”, and Georg Lukács, who came to the Soviet Union, wrote his famous Young Hegel here and defended this book as his doctoral thesis (1942). Lifshits and Lukács concentrate on Hegel’s “historical dialectic” and on his comprehension of the revolutionary events of his epoch. By the end of the Great Patriotic War, Hegel’s philosophy had been declared an “aristocratic reaction to the French Revolution” (Stalin), and hatred of Hegel became reflexive. The party of persecutors of “Hegelianshchina” was led by Zinovy Beletsky, Professor at Moscow State University. It was only after Stalin’s death that serious research into Hegel’s philosophy could be resumed. E. V. Ilyenkov interpreted dialectics as “the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete” and traced how this — materialistically reinterpreted — method works in Marx’s Das Kapital. It was Neo-Hegelians who brought to the fore the category of the concrete, understood as “diversity fused into unity” (Ivan Ilyin); in this respect, Lenin was in full solidarity with them. In parallel with European Marxists, Ilyenkov criticised the interpretation of dialectics as a universal picture of the world, a new metaphysics cultivated by “diamat” and “istmat”. He did not, however, share the anti-Hegelian sentiments of the schools of G. della Volpe and L. Althusser. For Ilyenkov, Hegel is the greatest revolutionary in logic since Aristotle. At the end of the article are the facts showing that interest in “Soviet Hegel” is still alive today

Russian Leviathan and the Marxist idea of dying out of the State

This paper deals with the causes of blatant discrepancies of Marxist idea of the state dying-off with the historical practice of "real socialism". The author concludes that the real possibility of the state dying-off is opened by the process of decentralization, personalization of production that results from the emergence of a new type of technology such as the programmable, automatically operating machine

The "revisionist revolution" and future prospects of Vygotskian studies

This article provides critical analysis of A. Yasnitsky’s project of "Cultural-Historical Gestalt Psychology." He uses this term to describe Vygotsky’s biggest discovery and the future of Vygotsky studie

Spinoza’s Doctrine of Affect in Cultural-Historical Psychology

Spinoza regarded life as an active play of affects, and human freedom as the taming of passions by means of the concepts of reason. Following him, Lev Vygotsky treats affect as the alpha and omega of mental development. The key theme of Vygotsky’s last manuscripts is the same as in Spinoza’s Ethics: man’s path to freedom via the reasonable mastery of his affects. Vygotsky defines freedom as the affect in the concept; in the last years of his life, he investigates the processes of synthesis of emotional and intellectual forms in a child’s psychical development. Following Spinoza, Vygotsky defines affect as a dynamogenic state of the body, increasing or decreasing its capacity for action. Thus, affect acts as the intrinsic driving force behind the behaviour of all living beings. In the Spinozist view, psychology is the science about production of affects in the process of objectoriented activity and about exchange of affects in the process of communication of living beings. Vygotsky did not have time to carry out his project of the new psychology of man, and his successors refused or failed to continue this work. Aleksey Leontiev, Vygotsky’s closest disciple and associate, denounced his turn to Spinoza and returned to the phenomenological treatment of affect as a form of experiencing activity. As a consequence, Vygotsky’s problem of the relation between affect and intellect proved to be unsolvable. The philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, who adhered to the Vygotsky school, linked the beginning of psychical activity to the formation of images of the external world, losing sight of affect and, thus, of the problem of freedom as understood by Spinoza. Resuming of L. S. Vygotsky’s height psychology project and studying the evolution of the psyche, based on the concept of freedom as the active mastery of human affects and communication relationships, form two growth points of cultural-historical psychology

An interview with Dmitri Gutov

Dimitrii Gutov is a russian artist and art theoretician. Born in Moscow, 1960, he is one of the most widely known and charismatic artists of the post-Soviet era. The theoretical interests of Gutov focus on the philosophy of Marx and the heritage of the Soviet aesthetician Mikhail Lifshit