Background
Ilyenkov, Eval'd Vasil'evich was born on February 18, 1924 in Smolensk.
Marxist dialectical materialist
Ilyenkov, Eval'd Vasil'evich was born on February 18, 1924 in Smolensk.
Moscow Institute of Philological and Literary Studies and Moscow University.
Worked at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, 1953-1979.
Ilyenkov was the most influential Soviet interpreter of Marx’s dialectical method in the postStalin period. His 1960 book The Dialectics of ll,e Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's 'Capita marked a serious return to the writings of Marx among Soviet philosophers, and the volume became a kind ot handbook for the rising generation. Ilyenkov regarded Marx’s materialist inversion of Hegel’s dialectic as constituting a universally valid method of inquiry. Like Hegelwhose thought he greatly admired, he believed that the dialectical method is sound because reality itself has a dialectical structure. Antinomies in thought, such as the paradoxes ol motion, reflect genuine contradictions in tf|e dialectical development of being. Hence the law of noncontradiction is false, and formal loglC should be replaced by Hegel’s more adequate dialectical logic. Ilyenkov’s enthusiasm for the Hegelian dialectic left him open to the charge of idealism, and he devoted considerable attention to developing a supposedly materialist theory of the ideal, based on the Marxian concepts of activity and objectification. This theory did not satisfy his orthodox dialectical materialist critics, however, for |l included the thesis that ideal phenomena^ although generated by human action, have objective existence once formed, and by accepting interaction between being and consciousness i aPpeared to reject the Marxian principle that the former determines the latter. Despite the philosophical sophistication and «dependence of mind displayed by Ilyenkov in his Principal areas of investigation, he accepted the Partisan role assigned Soviet philosophers by Marxist-Leninist ideology. Contribution to the communist social ideal was a recurring motif of his writing, expressed least subtly in the posthumously published book, Leninist Dialectics and die Metaphysics of Positivism (1980).