The Lord of the Rings

Evald Ilyenkov began his philosophical career in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin in the so-called time of the “Thaw,” when Stalinism was officially declared to be an anti-humanist and irrational “cult of personality.” At the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, the country was called to return to “Leninist norms.” To return to a pre-Stalinist 1920s also meant returning to revolutionary romanticism after decades of Stalinist bureaucratic rule, and to internationalism after a long period of national isolation. The new Soviet government under Khrushchev began to align itself with national liberation movements, establishing contacts with Josip Broz Tito and other nonaligned countries. An important event at the time was the Festival of Young People and Students, which took place in the summer of 1957 and attracted young people from fifty-two countries. In 1959, a major American art exhibition was organized in Russia; Soviet viewers could see artworks by Rothko, Pollock, De Kooning, and other abstract expressionist artists. In this period, the earth began to be experienced as a home for humanity as a whole; ideological divisions appeared to be obsolete.

Stalinism was officially rejected as irrational, quasi-religious, mythical, ritualistic, and dogmatic. It is thus only natural that post-Stalinist Russian philosophy sought to be rationalist, analytical, and scientific—or at least close to the sciences. Looking at a list of the most prominent representatives of Soviet philosophical thought during the era of the Thaw—Merab Mamardashvili, Alexander Zinovyev, Evald Ilyenkov, and Georgy Shchedrovitsky—all wrote about thinking, rational analysis, and scientific progress. All believe in the universality of rational philosophy, with its origin in the European Enlightenment. And all tended to speak for the whole of mankind. The later trajectories of these post-Stalinist Soviet philosophers took very different directions, even if they maintained some familial resemblance (Familienähnlichkeit), to use Wittgenstein’s word. In this text, I will not focus on these trajectories; nor will I cover Ilyenkov’s work as a whole. Rather, I concentrate on his early text “Cosmology of the Spirit,” written in the 1950s.

At the beginning of the text, Ilyenkov proclaims that human thought is the unsurpassable limit of the development of matter. It rejects the possibility of superior forms of thought, such as God or World Spirit. He writes:

Therefore, thought is the supreme product of the development of the universe. In it, in the birth of the thinking brain, universal matter attains such a degree after which all possibilities of further development “above” are exhausted—in terms of the complicated organization of forms of motion. After that, the path can only lead “down,” along the path of decomposition of this organization—to a purely biological-physiological level in the case of mental deterioration or still further—to simple chemistry in the case of the physiological death of the brain.1

Ilyenkov adds that we can only practice true philosophy if we believe that the human brain is the highest possible organ of thinking, otherwise “we would have admitted that there still exists a certain ‘something’ above nature and above thought, and this ‘something’ by virtue of its supernatural complexity, would be fundamentally unknowable, and inconceivable to thought.”2 According to Ilyenkov, such an admission can only lead to skepticism and agnosticism.

Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev tour the U.S. National Exhibition in Sokolniki Park, Moscow, July 1959. Photo credit: GPA Photo Archive, State Department. License: CC BY 2.0.

At first glance, Ilyenkov agrees with the main principle of Soviet Marxism: there is nothing above nature, and the human brain is a product of nature’s dialectical development. In the system of Soviet philosophy, historical materialism was considered part of dialectical materialism. In other words, human history was inscribed into cosmic processes, which were understood as dialectical. The main difference between Soviet Marxism and what can be called Western Marxism is precisely the status of dialectical materialism—or let’s say, the dialectic of nature. This difference was discussed by Alexandre Kojève—another Hegelian of Russian origin—in his unpublished manuscript Sophia: Philo-sophia i phenomenologia (1939–40).

Kojève writes in Sophia that the traditional understanding of nature was magical, where magic was based on a belief in the possibility of transforming things into other things. In this sense, magic is the dialectic, and the dialectic is magic. Magical processes are dialectical processes because they operate by the power of negation: they negate the previous states of things and transform them into different states. For a long time, magical thinking dominated the human understanding of nature. Ancient Greek philosophers were the first to establish the principle of identity that excluded the possibility of turning one thing into another—like lead into gold, for example. The error of the Greeks, according to Kojève, was to expand the principle of identity to humans. The principle of identity is correct for nature, but humans are not a part of nature and, thus, they can transform their essence, to become something different than they are. In this sense, Hegel’s dialectic is a return to magic, but a return that is relevant only for humans.

Thus, Kojève reads Hegel’s Phenomenology as a magic séance. He sees the origin of Hegel’s magical thinking in Hebrew theology, which concentrated all magic in the (absent) figure of God. According to Kojève, the ancient Hebrews moved in a direction opposed to the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. For Hebrew theology God is negativity: a free and creative spirit with magic powers. Christianity tried to unite this Hebrew understanding of God as negativity with the Greek understanding of God as identity. But this combination proved to be impossible. Here, Kojève follows Russian-Parisian philosopher Lev Shestov, who famously insisted on the impossibility of combining “Athens and Jerusalem.”3 According to Kojève, Hegel developed his anthropology by transferring the Judeo-Christian conception of God onto humans, who, as a result, became “magic things” able to self-transform. Hegelian man is independent of nature (in its Greek interpretation) and God (in its Judeo-Christian interpretation). It was in this way that Hegelian man entered Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, as Kojève calls Soviet philosophy. But Hegel made a mistake in trying to expand the dialectic of nature, which also undermined Soviet dialectical materialism and thus damaged the development of science in the Soviet Union.

Kojève calls Hegel’s dialectical understanding of nature and life “absurd,” He continues:

All this, in my opinion, is an error on Hegel’s part. Of course, I cannot make any sort of convincing critique of Hegelian philosophy here. But I should like to indicate that in my opinion the real (metaphysical) and “phenomenal” Dialectic of Nature exists only in Hegel’s (“Schellingian”) imagination.4

The expansion of the dialectic to nature is dictated by a naive will to monism. The world is de facto dualistic: nature is self-identical and described by science, but humanity is dialectical, or magical.

In “Cosmology,” Ilyenkov de facto reverses the standard Soviet relationship between dialectical and historical materialism. Right at the beginning of his essay, he discusses the hypothesis of the “thermal death of the universe”: according to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe permanently loses its energy and is destined to turn into a cold desert in which life will be impossible. The initial form of the universe is a superhot cloud of matter and energy, but the universe will end as formless cold matter without energy. Such a perspective is unacceptable for Ilyenkov because it makes nature non-dialectical. If nature is a singular event with a beginning and an end, then it lacks any necessity, including the necessity dictated by the laws of the dialectic. Nature becomes accidental. True philosophy, he suggests, deals with necessities and not accidents. Therefore, such a perspective leads merely to skepticism and agnosticism—and for Ilyenkov that is unacceptable. To become dialectical, a process must go through an infinite number of circles. One circle is not enough.

But when a cycle of nature’s existence comes to an end, how is it possible to trigger a reversal and initiate a new cycle? That is the central question to which Ilyenkov’s essay is dedicated. The answer is the following: In the future, humanity will acquire enough knowledge and accumulate enough energy to make not only the earth but the whole universe explode. When this explosion takes place, the universe will turn into a hot, energetic cloud again, and the cosmic process will restart. This cosmic process will inevitably lead to the reemergence of thinking beings similar to humans. Here, Ilyenkov relies fully on the alleged laws of dialectical materialism. He believes that these laws will not change, and the new universe will necessarily follow the same trajectory of dialectical magic that Kojève discussed.

El Lissitzky’s poster for a post-revolutionary production of the opera. The macaronic caption reads: All is well that begins well and has not ended. License: Public Domain.

Thus, for humans the main problem is not to build a cosmos—since nature does that on its own—but to return to the original chaos. This understanding of the highest goal of human creativity connects Ilyenkov with the revolutionary projects of the Russian avant-garde. The plot of the opera Victory over the Sun, written by Khlebnikov, Krychenykh, Malevich, and Matyushin in 1913, is proof enough. The four protagonists of this opera capture the sun with their own hands and establish the reign of chaos. Ilyenkov, for his part, relies on technology. Crucially, Ilyenkov understands technology not as a mode of production but as a force of negativity, of destruction, as powerful as the God of the Bible or Hegelian Absolute Spirit. By means of technology, humans become capable of not only denying their own nature but of destroying nature as such. It is this introduction of absolute negativity into natural processes by means of technology that makes nature truly dialectical. Humanity armed with the destructive forces of technology begins to play the role of God as a force of negation leading to apocalypse. This means that the dialectic of nature becomes possible, but only through the integration of nature into human history as the history of technology. Thus, dialectical materialism and historical materialism swap places. Nature becomes dialectical because it is only a moment in the dialectical development of history of “thinking beings,” as Ilyenkov calls humans.

Indeed, to commit an act of collective suicide and destroy the old universe in the name of the new and rejuvenated universe, thinking beings must develop the power of negation that was traditionally thought to belong only to God, or to gods. Like many of his contemporaries, Ilyenkov saw the proof that this power is not only possible but within reach in the development of the nuclear bomb. The new feeling of empowerment that humanity experienced from the bomb is well described by Günther Anders in his Antuqiertheit des Menschen (The obsolescence of man), written in 1956: “If in the consciousness of contemporary man there is something that is recognized as absolute or infinite, it is not the Power of God and not the power of Nature but our power … Because we have power to annihilate each other, we are the Lords of the Apocalypse … The infinite are we.”5

As a rule, the development of the bomb was—especially when Ilyenkov wrote his essay—considered in moralistic terms. One deplored that scientific reason brought about a machine that could destroy humanity instead of producing the means for the peaceful improvement of human civilization. Ilyenkov showed himself to be a true Hegelian by proclaiming the negative, destructive power of the bomb to be the means for improving not only humanity but the cosmos as such. He equated thinking spirit with the nuclear explosion. Throughout the whole of his essay, Ilyenkov refers directly or indirectly to nuclear power and its destructive potential as the highest manifestation of thought. Let me cite at some length Ilyenkov’s description of the manmade cosmic explosion:

In simple terms, thought turns out to be a necessary mediating link, thanks only to which the fiery “rejuvenation” of universal matter becomes possible; it proves to be this direct “efficient cause” that leads to the instant activation of endless reserves of interconnected motion, in a similar manner to how it currently initiates a chain reaction, artificially destroying a small quantity of the core of radioactive material. In this given case the process, apparently, will also have a “chainlike” form, that is, a reaction, one that self-reproduces itself in a spiral-like way; a reaction that creates, along its own particular course, the condition for its own flux in its expanding (at every moment) scale. Only in this given case does the chain reaction spread not through the artificially accumulated reserves of radioactive material, but through the naturally accumulated reserves of motion of the Universe, the reserves connected with the condition of “thermal death” in the universal space. In simple terms, this act materializes in the guise of a colossal cosmic explosion having a chain-like character, and the matter of which (the explosive mass) emerges as the totality of elementary structures, is dispersed by emissions through the whole universal space. From the perspective of contemporary physics this does not appear at all inconceivable.6

In other words, the existing universe should be entirely transformed into a nuclear bomb and then made to explode, leaving only a radioactive cloud that will evolve into a new universe.

For Ilyenkov, humanity should not passively wait for the moment when it dies, weak and depressed, in a universe turned into cold and formless matter. Instead, humans should commit suicide by letting themselves explode together with the whole universe. Having a choice between passively waiting for death or actively meeting it at the peak of one’s vital forces, humans must choose a collective suicide that will rejuvenate the universe. Even if for Ilyenkov humans are primarily “thinking beings,” in these formulations one can’t help but overhear Nietzschean undertones. Noting that the “last men” would not be able to commit collective suicide, Ilyenkov writes: “Indeed in this case thought turns out to be something like mold on a cooling planet, something like the senile disease of matter, and certainly not the highest flower of creation, not the highest product of universal world development.”7 However, Ilyenkov does not, like Nietzsche, expect humans to give birth to a dancing star by some superhuman explosion of vital energy. Instead, remaining within the Marxist tradition, he projects his hopes onto technology.

A question arises here: Is it possible that humans will nevertheless prefer slow death in the cold to instantaneous death by nuclear explosion? In this case nature would become a singular, accidental event; true philosophy would become impossible; and skepticism and agnosticism would prevail. How can this be prevented from happening? This leads to another question: What could bring the whole of humanity to commit suicide in the first place? Ilyenkov has an answer:

The human, a thinking spirit, returns its old debt to nature. At some point, in its youth, nature engendered thinking spirit. Now, on the contrary, the thinking spirit, at the cost of its own existence, returns to mother nature, dying of “thermal death,” a new incandescent youth—a state in which it is able once again to start colossal development cycles, which at some point again, at a different point in time and space will once more lead to the emergence of a new thinking brain, a new thinking spirit from its cooling core.8

Humanity’s dignity depends on fulfilling the moral obligation to return “its old debt to nature.” The notion of debt has a long history. In can be discussed from many different angles, but here I will follow the way Kojève discusses it in his Sophia, where he compares the Hegelian dialectic to Marcel Mauss’s symbolic economy.9 This economy operates on the exchange of gifts, a practice that historically preceded the emergence of the market economy. But Mauss argues that the exchange of gifts is still present, even that it dominates social interactions in modern everyday life. We are still exchanging gifts. And if we accept a gift, we feel dependent on the giver. In other words, to give a gift means to acquire power over the receiver of the gift. If in the framework of the market economy monetary loss is simply a loss, in the framework of the symbolic—or per Mauss, the general economy—a consciously practiced loss of monetary value leads to the acquisition of symbolic value. Here, negation and, especially, self-negation carried out by an economic subject increases the symbolic value of this subject. This is why gift-giving is also an act of violence. Mauss offers the following example: if somebody invites you to a dinner, it obliges you to send a counter-invitation. As Mauss rightly says, the Germans call it “to take revenge” (sich zu revanchieren). This shows that symbolic exchange is a form of war: a gift is an attack and a counter-gift, a counterattack.

Evald Ilyenkov

If in the framework of human society symbolic exchange remains reciprocal, it can also take the form of total, one-sided self-destruction. This form of symbolic exchange is called the “potlatch.” The word is taken from the language of North American Indigenous peoples. It is the name of a competition among tribes consisting in the destruction of their own property. The tribe that destroys more of its own property than other tribes gets the highest rank in the system of governance until the next potlatch. Mauss writes about the frenzy, the ecstasy of self-destruction, but at the same time he underscores the role of self-interest in this process:

The extravagant consumption of wealth, particularly in the potlatch, always exaggerated and often purely destructive, in which goods long stored are all at once given away or destroyed, lends to these institutions the appearance of wasteful expenditure and child-like prodigality. Not only are valuable goods thrown away and foodstuffs consumed to excess but there is destruction for its own sake—coppers are thrown into the sea or broken. But the motives of such excessive gifts and reckless consumption, such mad losses and destruction of wealth, especially in these potlatch societies, are in no way disinterested. Between vassals and chiefs, between vassals and their henchmen, the hierarchy is established by means of these gifts. To give is to show one’s superiority, to show that one is something more and higher, that one is magister. To accept without returning or repaying more is to face subordination, to become a client and subservient, to become minister.10

In the case of the potlatch, men are involved in the competition for self-destruction. They give back the thing that has put them into debt, that has made them indebted. But indebted to whom? Mauss suggests the answer: they are indebted to nature. Later, Georges Bataille built his whole philosophical discourse around the notion of the potlatch. We call somebody “gifted” if nature endowed them with a special talent. The so-called poète maudit or artiste maudit feels an obligation to give back to nature this gift: to destroy it with the goal of not profiting from it. But why this obligation? Because to accept a gift from nature means to be enslaved by it. According to Bataille, one rejects the gifts of nature in search of sovereignty. In this sense, every human being has an obligation to ruin their life, to return the gift of life and become sovereign. Of course, Bataille understood sovereignty as independence. He did not consider the possibility that nature would profit from the returned gift. However, that is precisely what Ilyenkov means. Ilyenkov establishes humanity as a magister having real power over nature, and nature as a minister because humanity is proclaimed to be able to bring nature back to the zero point of its development.

The collective suicide of humanity becomes the fulfilment of a moral obligation to give the gift of life back to nature. Through its voluntary death, humanity makes its mother (mother nature) young again. So far, so good. But this decision makes the whole dialectic of nature dependent on the moral choice that humanity makes, on its readiness to fulfil its obligation in the symbolic exchange with nature. And let us not forget that, according to Ilyenkov, the dialectic process must have no beginning and no end; it must be infinitely circular. Such an infinite circulation presupposes that at the end of every cosmic period, every humanity takes the decision to explode itself and thus let the universe start a new cosmic period. Here dialectical materialism is inscribed not merely into historical materialism but into the symbolic exchange between universe and humanity, between nature and spirit.

Ilyenkov’s cosmology is very close to numerous Indian cosmologies, according to which universal life is cyclical: the end of every universe is a new beginning, and the beginning of every universe is its end. At the end of every cosmic period (known as “a kalpa” in Hinduism), the existing universe is destroyed by fire and the next universe is born. This destruction is called “Pralaya” in Hindu eschatology. In some Indian traditions, Pralaya is related to knowledge, but it is, of course, knowledge of the non-distinction between Atman and Brahman that leads to the liberation of the spirit.

Pralaya is a moment in a cosmic process that is regulated by dharma, or “the way of all things.” Of course, Hindu philosophy calls humans to follow dharma. But to follow dharma is not the same as to control dharma, or dictate dharma, or be lord of dharma. Like Hegelian Absolute Spirit, dharma is independent of human will. Dharma imposes a certain ethics on human beings, but insofar as it regulates the fate of the universe it is independent of our ethical choices.

In a certain way, Ilyenkov’s cosmology is close to the various teachings of the Russian cosmists at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The only difference is that cosmist teachings called on humanity to realize the Christian promise of immortality by technological means, while Ilyenkov calls on humanity to realize by technological means the Indian-style rejuvenation of the universe through cosmic fire. In all these cases, the very existence of the universe is made dependent on the ethical choices made by humanity. And dependent on not only living humanity in the present, but also past humanities and humanities of the future. Even if every particular universe exists and develops according to dialectical laws, the transition from one universe to the next happens as an act of will by “thinking beings,” who do or do not carry out this act. Thus, the existence of the universe, and even more importantly the possibility of true dialectical philosophy, is made dependent on the ethical decisions of humans. That is probably why, in his later philosophical career, ethics became so central to Ilyenkov’s thinking.