(BQ) Part 2 book "Dialectics of the ideal" has contents: Reality of the - ideal, metamorphoses of meaning - the concept of the ideal from a semiotic, bibliography of evald ilyenkov’s works, metamorphoses of meaning - The concept of the ideal from a semiotic,. and other contents. | Part Three Commentaries Reality of the Ideal Andrey Maidansky Marxism started with a revolt against its nurse – Hegel’s philosophy. In 1845 in Brussels, as Marx remembered, he and Engels decided to ‘settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience (Gewissen)’.1 The radical error of Hegelianism consists in the belief that ideas rule over the world, and the whole history of mankind is some ‘other-being’ of pure ideas. So Marx and Engels intended to turn philosophy upside down – to drive away philosophy, with its ‘drunken speculation’, from the ‘science of history’ (Wissenschaft der Geschichte), and to depict reality as it is, materialistically. The subject of philosophy had been narrowed down to the ‘realm of pure thoughts’. Das Reich des reinen Gedankens is the only thing that falls to the share of philosophy after the expulsion of it from nature and history by ‘positive sciences’, Engels To study the laws of the thought process – formal logic and the dialectical method – is all that philosophers could do with profit to the cause. All the other ‘philosophical chattels’ became useless for a scientific understanding of reality. Very soon after, however, Georgy Plekhanov and his pupils resurrected philosophy as a science about all and everything: ‘the general synthetic view on nature and life’.3 Later, the drawing of a philosophical picture of the world, à la Comte or Eugen Dühring, becomes the favourite business of Soviet Diamat. 1. Marx 1961b, p. 10. 2. See Engels 1962, p. 306. 3. Plekhanov 1928, p. 324. ‘Philosophy is a synthesis of cognised being of the given epoch’; Plekhanov 1928, p. 325. 126 • Andrey Maidansky Young Evald Ilyenkov attempted to return Marxist philosophy to its roots, having restricted its subject to the sphere of ‘pure thought’. Theses on the subject of philosophy, written by Ilyenkov and Valentin Korovikov, caused a juicy scandal at Moscow University, after which both philosophers were removed from teaching .
