Evald Ilyenkov and the Moscow Logical Circle: Materials of Polemics

Abstract

The publication deals with an almost forgotten dispute between two currents of Russian philosophy that emerged on the threshold of the “Thaw”. Its leaders were Evald Ilyenkov and Aleksander Zinoviev, both of whom had just graduated from Moscow State University. The dispute revolved around the methodology of Marx’s Capital and then developed into a discussion of the subject of dialectical logic and the specifics of thought. Ilyenkov’s archive preserved the theses of his speeches and critical notes on the position of Zinoviev and his followers from the Moscow Logical Circle. This material is published below. The accompanying article reconstructs the contexts of the polemic – theoretical, cultural-historical and personal – and weighs the arguments of each side. The inadequacy of labelling Ilyenkov as a “gnoseologist” is demonstrated. The thesis he defends about the dialectical identity of thinking and being invalidates the very distinction between gnoseology and ontology. The Kantian origins of Zinoviev and his teachers, professors at the Moscow State University, in solving the problem of the specificity of thought are revealed. All of them proclaimed the distinction between the “subjective dialectic” in the human mind and the “objective dialectic” of the external world – in opposition to the principle of the identity of thinking and being, which they regarded as the “Hegelian mysticism”. Ilyenkov, on the other hand, pointed out that this identity is fulfilled before our eyes in practice – in the processes of human labour.