Thanks, Peter, for the great from Il'enkov - that was exactly what I meant
(Lenin repeated Marx's statement many times - arguably uncritically). As far
as I've heard from Davydov's circle, Il'enkov was criticized in the USSR for
being not materialist enough.
Eugene
_____
From: Peter Moxhay [mailto:moxhap@portlandschools.org]
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 11:23 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: Il'enkov: The ideal
Eugene wrote:
I think Il'enkov had to "dance" to avoid being seen as anti-Leninist. As far
as I remember reading Lenin, Lenin gave a very primitive definition of the
ideal as the material transferred into individual heads (or something like
that - it is interesting that Il'enkov avoided citing Lenin in his article
but instead uses Rubenstein).
In his Dialectical Logic, Ilyenkov actually refers to Marx as the source of
the "transplanted into the head" definition of the ideal, and argues for its
subtlety:
"When Marx defines the ideal as 'the material,' transplanted into the human
head and transformed in it, he did not at all understand this 'head'
naturalistically or in the sense of natural science. Here he had in mind the
socially developed head of man, all of whose forms of activity, starting
with the forms of language, its supply of words and syntactic structure, and
ending with its logical categories, are products and forms of social
development. Only, being expressed in these forms, the external and material
is transformed into a social fact, into the common property of social man,
i.e. into the ideal."
What do you think?
Peter
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