Evald Ilyenkov's “Cosmology of spirit” as a manifesto of communist ethics
This article reconstructs the political subtext of Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov's essay “Cosmology of Spirit”. Although there has recently been a revival of interest in Soviet thought, there is a lack of specialised political and philosophical studies of non-dogmatic Russian Marxism, which is why this topic is relevant. “Cosmology of the Spirit” has previously received little attention in relation to its ethical and political content; this article proposes a new perspective on this issue. The first part analyses the historical and intellectual context that shaped the content of Ilyenkov's early work. “Cosmology of Spirit” is considered in relation to the post-war Soviet era, the development of science and the creation of atomic weapons. By assessing the ideological context, I demonstrate that “Cosmology of Spirit” addressed a gap in Soviet ideology concerning fundamental questions about the 'meaning of life', yet it did not align with the realities of dogmatism. Next, I attempt to reconstruct the ethical and political meaning of “Cosmology of Spirit”. Ilyenkov's essay is interpreted as a speculative manifestation of the communist ethic of self-sacrifice. I then analyse the essay's main political move. This involves granting the struggle for communism a new status as the primary condition for the self-realisation of thinking beings within a materialist cosmology. In the concluding section, I propose a comparison between contemporary speculative currents (speculative realism) in philosophy and Ilyenkov's speculative cosmology. I demonstrate that, just as 'Cosmology of Spirit' reflects the aspiration for a future classless society, contemporary speculative theories reflect the ideology of contemporary capitalism. Therefore, the conclusion is that speculative realism is a philosophy of political conformism and that we must consider Ilyenkov's cosmology a radical, subversive alternative.
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The study is funded by the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), project number 24-18-00130 “E. V. Ilyenkov and the End of Classical Marxist Philosophy”.