Rogney Piedra Arencibia

A menudo se cree que la única alternativa a una concepción idealista de los fenómenos naturales excluye tanto la presencia de formas universales objetivas como su progresión hacia formas superiores como finalidad de los procesos en el mundo natural. El realismo con respecto a lo universal y los enfoques teleológicos en los procesos son signos de idealismo. Por lo tanto, el materialismo, al parecer, debe ajustarse a una visión nominalista y mecanicista de la naturaleza. Sin embargo, una lectura inteligentemente materialista de los clásicos del idealismo revela un escenario más complejo. Un hecho real se expresa de manera mística en las concepciones idealistas de los universales objetivos y la teleología. Este artículo intenta mostrar tal hecho real en su forma auténtica (materialista). Con ese objetivo en mente, el presente artículo discute la noción de alienación de la naturaleza, la distinción entre universales abstractos y concretos, y el concepto de interacción dialéctica. El surgimiento histórico-natural de una forma superior de organización de la materia asimila, como sus órganos, las condiciones que le precedieron en el tiempo, transformándose en productor activo de tales condiciones. Ese es el secreto vislumbrado pero no correctamente comprendido por el idealismo que un materialista consecuente no debe ignorar.

This paper examines Ilyenkov’s views on the relationship between language, practical activity, and the ideal. It addresses three key aspects of this relationship: 1) the distinction between philosophy and the sciences that study language; 2) the dialectical relationship between labour and language and its role in the production of the ideal; and 3) the significance of this understanding of the relationship between language, practice, and thought in the psycho-pedagogical approach of cultural-historical activity theory. The main argument advanced in the paper can be summarized as follows: for Ilyenkov, philosophy is the study of the objective laws of cognition of reality, which cannot be discovered or deduced through the analysis of language. Philosophy is not linguistics. Nevertheless, language plays a necessary role in Ilyenkov’s account of philosophy’s true object, the ideal: language is an internal mediation of human activity in its transformation of the material world. Language is not the producer of meaning, but human practice, which has labour as its elementary form. Language itself is a consequence of labour, but the relationship between the two is dialectical: the consequence becomes the cause, and vice versa. Once language emerges as a product of practice, it elevates this activity to a new level by enabling a greater detachment (and thus further control) not only from the object but also from the schema of our activity toward it. This, along with its social-historical mnemonic role, is the fundamental function of language according to Ilyenkov’s conception of the ideal as an essential component of human activity. Therefore, in abstraction from practical activity, language ceases to be a medium of the ideal and becomes a purely material or psychological (non-specifically ideal) phenomenon. Then, far from being a tool for cognition and the formation of the mind, it becomes an obstacle, a fetish.

Labour is the cornerstone of Marxist understanding of the human being and the nature of his thought. This is true both from the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic point of view. The present article tries to introduce itself in that understanding starting from the ideas of Marx and Engels seen from the prism of the activity theory. The specifically human thought only arises when the individual internalizes the socio-historically developed forms of interaction with reality inscribed in the external objects that constitute the system of culture. This appropriation takes place not only through the use of artifacts, but also through the relationships that the individual establishes with other human beings in daily activity. Near the end of the paper, is made a philosophical analysis of the educational experience with blind-deaf-mute children under the direction of A. I. Meshcheryakov that provides a paradigmatic demonstrative case of the sustained theses.

It is often believed that the only alternative to an idealist conception of natural phenomena excludes both the presence of objective universal forms and their progression towards higher forms as the finality of processes in the natural world. Realism regarding the universal and teleological approaches regarding processes are signs of idealism. Therefore, materialism, it would seem, must conform to a nominalist and mechanical view of nature. However, an intelligent materialist reading of idealism’s classics reveals a more complex scenario. A real fact is expressed in a mystical fashion in idealism’s conceptions of objective universals and teleology. This article attempts to show such a real fact in its authentic (materialist) form. With that goal in mind, the present article discusses the notion of nature’s alienation, the distinction between abstract and concrete universals, and the concept of dialectical interaction. The natural-historical emergence of a higher form of matter’s organization assimilates, as its organs, the conditions that preceded it in time, transforming itself into an active producer of such conditions. That is the secret glimpsed but not correctly understood by idealism that a consistent materialist should not ignore.

Para determinar el papel de la filosofía kantiana en la lógica dialéctica, se proponen ocho aspectos del aporte de Kant a su desarrollo. Kant, al mostrar la dialéctica inmanente de la actividad sintética del pensamiento teórico, marcó el punto de partida de la lógica dialéctica moderna como la filosofía epistémica acorde con la nueva cosmovisión científico-natural que él mismo iniciara. Sin embargo, al no llevar estos aspectos dialécticos hasta sus últimas consecuencias, la filosofía kantiana, quedó en el comienzo mismo del movimiento que, por mediación de otros pensadores, arribaría a la lógica dialéctica marxista.

This paper confronts the familiar prejudice in Western Marxism that Engels’ thought, as articulated in Anti-Duhring and the Dialectics of Nature, is of marginal interest and should be excised from Marxist theory. I argue that this view is mistaken. If we do not take seriously his insights about science, philosophy, nature, and history, his insights will take a fourfold revenge upon us. Natural science takes its revenge by unleashing technology that subjugates us in ways we cannot anticipate, understand or control. Philosophy, in turn, takes revenge on science for neglecting the philosophical presuppositions of its own worldview. Nature itself takes its revenge upon those who consider it to be some formless and passive matter, deprived of history and negativity, responding to our productive activity in surprising ways that, without a rational form of regulation, could lead to our own extinction. Lastly, history takes revenge on those ‘well intentioned’ actors who try to impose their will upon it without a scientific knowledge of its internal, necessary, and objective forces.

Within the current resurgence of interest in E.V. Ilyenkov, the influence of Engels on Ilyenkov’s work is either overlooked or denied, making Ilyenkov seem closer to Western Marxism than he actually is. In this paper, by considering Engels’s place in his philosophy, I show that Ilyenkov’s approach is fundamentally hostile to many of Western Marxism’s main views. Ilyenkov, like Engels, conceives philosophy as Logic and affirms the ‘alliance’ between philosophy and the natural sciences against speculative metaphysics. In this regard, he develops an original cosmological hypothesis based on Engels’s insights on the hierarchy of matter’s forms of movement and provides a remarkable account of the ideal as an attribute of nature that reproduces its concrete universality through social labour, the active transformation of nature’s phenomena into objects stamped with the seal of our subjectivity.