Social and Physical Form: Ilyenkov on the Ideal and Marx on the Value-Form
 Andrew Chitty, 
University of Sussex
 in Evald Ilyenkov’s Philosophy Revisited, ed. V. Oittinen, Kikimora Publications, Helsinki, 2000, pp. 229-263 

E.V. Ilyenkov’s philosophy represents an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to use the idea that human social activity has determinate ‘forms’ to achieve three different goals: an account of the categories of thought, an account of our knowledge of the natural world, and an account of human consciousness.1 Overarching these goals, and incorporating them, is another: that of giving an account of mind based on social activity. Ilyenkov’s conception of the ideal, or of ideality, plays a central role in this project. We could go as far as to say that for Ilyenkov ‘ideality’ is the most fundamental feature of human mindedness. By demonstrating that ideality is an objective yet non-physical feature of social activities, and of the things used and produced by social activities, Ilyenkov aims to show that an elementary human mindedness inheres in these activities and things, which makes possible the fully-fledged human mindedness that characterises individual reflective human beings. Understanding Ilyenkov’s account of mind, therefore, depends on gaining a clear grasp of his conception of the ideal. Yet, notoriously, that conception has proved an elusive one to pin down. In this article, I shall attempt to elucidate some aspects of Ilyenkov’s conception of the ideal by taking as a cue his statement, in his article ‘The Problem of the Ideal’, that ‘the ideality of the value-form is an extremely typical and characteristic case of ideality in general’ (DI 207, CI 90-91).2 This suggests that Ilyenkov develops his account of the ideality of human activities and the things involved in those activities by generalising from Marx’s account of the value-form of commodities.3 And in fact in this article, which is his fullest exposition of the concept of the ideal, Ilyenkov – after attacking his opponents and commenting on the notion of the ideal in Plato, Kant and Hegel – presents his own

 Of course this is not to deny the influence of other antecedents, most obviously of Hegel’s account of ‘objective spirit’, in the formation of Ilyenkov’s concept of the ideal. account of the ideal precisely through a discussion of Marx’s account of the value-form. My procedure here will be to comment in detail on this presentation, adopting the working assumption that in it Ilyenkov is in fact generalising from Marx’s value-form to arrive at his concept of the ideal. This will lead to some conclusions about the nature of Ilyenkov’s generalisation from Marx, and about the conception of the ideal that results from it

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