The Ideal (Ilyenkov)
이상적인 것 (일리옌코프)
A concept formulated by the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov in the 1962 Philosophical Encyclopedia entry "The Ideal" and in his posthumous essay "The Problem of the Ideal" (1979). It holds that intangible things such as the meaning of words, the value of commodities, norms and knowledge do not sit inside individual brains but exist objectively in people's shared activity and in the things, signs and institutions that activity has made. Ilyenkov defined the ideal as "the form of a thing, but outside that thing, namely in man, as the form of his active activity". It became widely known through the brain-and-mind controversy he fought from 1968 with the philosopher David Dubrovsky.
In depth
Why is "the ideal" a problem?
Take a banknote. However closely you analyse the paper and ink, you will not find its value in them. Yet the value is not merely in your head either: if you forget it, the baker still hands you bread for that piece of paper. The meaning of a word, the force of a law and the truth of a theorem are the same. They are plainly real and they move our lives, but they do not lie anywhere the way physical objects do. Philosophy called such things "the ideal" (Russian идеальное, German das Ideelle) and has long argued about where and how it exists.
"Ideal" here does not mean "perfect" but "of the nature of ideas", as opposed to "material". Marx's das Ideelle is therefore often rendered in English as "the ideal" and in Korean as "관념적인 것".
There were two classic answers. Idealism from Plato to Hegel took the ideal to be a world of spirit or Ideas existing apart from matter. Many materialists and natural scientists, on the contrary, tried to explain it as a physiological process in the brain. Official Soviet philosophy, too, took Lenin's theory of reflection, which treats consciousness as the brain's image of the external world, as its basic frame. Ilyenkov thought both answers wrong and opened a third way. Following it shows at once how Marxism can understand consciousness, culture and education.
What did Ilyenkov argue?
In the entry "The Ideal" in the second volume of the Philosophical Encyclopedia (1962), Ilyenkov made his position clear from the first paragraph: "The ideal is not an individual-psychological, still less a physiological fact, but a social-historical fact, a product and a form of spiritual production."
Идеальное есть не индивидуально-психологический, тем более не физиологический факт, а факт общественно-исторический, продукт и форма духовного производства.
His starting point was the sentence in which Marx, in the afterword to the second edition of Capital, Volume I (1873), turned Hegel upside down: for Marx "the ideal is nothing else than the material transposed and translated in the human head". Ilyenkov read "transposed and translated" not as chemistry inside the head but as a transformation brought about by people's practical activity.
das Ideelle nichts andres als das im Menschenkopf umgesetzte und übersetzte Materielle.
Think of a carpenter making a chair. The shape of the chair is not inside the wood, nor is it the shape of the carpenter's brain cells. The carpenter learned "how chairs are made" from chairs and drawings made by others and from movements taught to him, and by moving his body accordingly he gives the wood its shape. The chair's form exists first as a mode of people's activity, then as the thing that activity leaves behind. Ilyenkov summed it up: "The ideal is therefore nothing else than the form of a thing, but outside that thing, namely in man, as the form of his active activity."
Идеальное есть поэтому не что иное, как форма вещи, но вне этой вещи, а именно в человеке, в виде формы его активной деятельности.
An important conclusion follows. Individuals do not produce the ideal on their own; they learn and appropriate what already exists in society. An infant masters the spoon, speech, counting and manners one by one in activity shared with adults. The ideal is an objective form of culture that awaits each person, before birth, in the shape of language, tools and norms. Consciousness arises as the individual brings it inside.
Why is money the best example?
In his last essay, "The Problem of the Ideal", published posthumously in instalments from Voprosy filosofii no. 6 of 1979, Ilyenkov made Marx's analysis of value his decisive evidence. Marx wrote in Capital that the value form of the commodity is a "purely ideal" form, and Ilyenkov stressed this: "According to Marx, the form of value in general (and not only its money form) is a 'purely ideal' form."
Маркс, форма стоимости вообще (а не только денежная ее форма) есть форма «чисто идеальная».
Yet this ideal form is in nobody's head. The price of a commodity is set in the relations in which people exchange the products of their labour on the market, and it works whatever any individual thinks of it. In Ilyenkov's words, "the form of value is ideal, although it exists outside human consciousness". Whoever would explain consciousness by physiology cannot explain value by brain cells. Money thus becomes the clearest case showing that the ideal lives in social relations, not in the brain.
форма стоимости идеальна, хотя существует вне сознания человека
From this comes the structure of representation. A diplomat is one person but represents a whole country; money is a piece of paper but represents the value of all commodities; a word is a bundle of sounds but represents the meaning of things. When one thing, while remaining itself, stands for the "essence" of another, that relation of representation is the ideal. Ilyenkov also called the ideal "a scheme of man's real, objective activity, in keeping with a form outside the head, outside the brain".
«Идеальное» — это схема реальной, предметной деятельности человека, согласующаяся с формой вне головы, вне мозга.
This analysis connects with Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. Ilyenkov explained the phenomenon in which social relations between people appear as properties of things as one form of the ideal objectified in things. But where fetishism is a critical concept aimed at the inverted situation in which such objectifications rule people, the ideal is a wider concept about how all cultural meaning exists.
What was the dispute with Dubrovsky about?
The theory became known beyond specialists through the 1968 controversy. That year the philosopher David Dubrovsky published "Brain and Psyche" in Voprosy filosofii no. 8, criticizing the philosopher Felix Mikhailov and Ilyenkov. Mikhailov, in The Riddle of the Human Self, had dismissed the psychophysiological problem, the question of how mind relates to brain, as a pseudo-problem of vulgar materialism, and Ilyenkov had backed him. Dubrovsky argued that the achievements of neurophysiology since Sechenov and Pavlov must not be ignored and that one should study by which "neurodynamic code" subjective phenomena are realized in the brain. He also criticized the denial of genetic factors in the formation of individual abilities.
Ilyenkov hit back in no. 11 of the same year with "Psyche and Brain (A Reply to D. I. Dubrovsky)". He held that the specifically human functions and structures of the brain are determined by people's modes of activity as social beings, and he put the degree at "100 per cent, and not 90 or even 99 per cent".
на 100 % — а не на 90 и даже не на 99 %
He saw Dubrovsky's position as leading to a "genetic horoscope" drawn up for each child to sort careers. Such neurophysiology would become a tool for selecting children, and society would come to resemble Aldous Huxley's Brave New World rather than the communism of Marx and Lenin. Behind the reply lay a political conviction: that every normal child can grow into a talented person given the right conditions of education. The same conviction drew Ilyenkov deep into the education of deafblind children, the Zagorsk experiment.
The controversy soon turned to the definition of the ideal. In "Brain and Psyche" Dubrovsky put forward the notion of "subjective reality": the world of sensations and thoughts that an individual lives through directly is a reality of its own that does not reduce to social forms. He later took the concept of information as the link between matter and consciousness and studied how subjective phenomena relate to their neural carriers. Ilyenkov and his pupils criticized this for years, and philosophers of other persuasions joined in. The debate is remembered as Soviet philosophy's classic confrontation over whether consciousness is in the brain or in social activity.
The aesthetician Mikhail Lifshitz also argued with Ilyenkov about the ideal, from another angle. If the ideal is only a form that social activity stamps on things, he asked, how can the objectivity of perfect form and beauty in nature and reality itself be explained? Russian scholars still discuss the difference between them as the "Ilyenkov–Lifshitz dialogue".
How was it received in and beyond the USSR?
Ilyenkov's theory sat uneasily with official Soviet philosophy. From the textbook theory of reflection, which treats consciousness as a "reflection" of the outer world, the claim that the ideal exists objectively in social forms outside the head looked suspiciously like idealism or even Platonism, and he did face ideological criticism for it. He summed up his life's work in the manuscript "The Dialectics of the Ideal", written in spring 1976, but the Russian text did not appear in his lifetime; only an English version, cut nearly in half and altered by an editor, came out shortly before his death. Only after he took his own life in March 1979 did Voprosy filosofii publish part of the manuscript as "The Problem of the Ideal".
Outside the USSR the concept has been reappraised since the 1990s. David Bakhurst, the leading English-language scholar of Ilyenkov, has read it alongside Platonism, and Tom Rockmore has pointed to its overlap with Karl Popper's "World 3" of objective knowledge. Bakhurst valued it as an original solution to the old problem of the place of the non-material in the natural world. Its influence runs into Vygotskian psychology and pedagogy and into activity theory in Finland and North America.
What does it mean to read it today?
With brain imaging and artificial intelligence, the idea that the mind is in the brain looks more self-evident than ever. Ilyenkov's theory questions that self-evidence. Does not the very fact that language models produce plausible sentences by learning from human writing suggest that meanings and norms are deposited not in individual heads but in the language and texts people have made together? Conversely, Dubrovsky's question, what the directly lived subjective experience of an individual is and how it connects to the brain, also remains open.
For students of Marxism the concept teaches two things. Marx's theory of value can be a philosophical key to consciousness and culture, not only to economics. And the conviction that human abilities are not innate but depend on socially organized activity and education is tied to a political demand for equality in education and for society's responsibility.