This is a book of philosophy, and the argument inside it is a real one.
That sentence should not need writing, but in a series devoted to the export literature of Progress Publishers it does. Most of the titles reissued here are commissioned works: an institute produced them, a line governed them, and where they touch a contested question the reader can predict the answer before turning the page. The Problem of the Ideal is not that kind of book. It is a technical monograph on the mind–brain problem and on the philosophical category of the ideal, written by a man who had spent twenty years on the subject, and it is the second half of one of the few genuine controversies Soviet philosophy conducted in the open. The other party to that controversy was Evald Ilyenkov, the most original philosopher his generation in the USSR produced, who had been pushed out of his positions and who killed himself in 1979.
What Dubrovsky does with Ilyenkov is the whole interest of this volume, and it is not what a reader of this series will expect.
Progress issued the English text in 1988, translated from the Russian by Vladimir Stankevich. The spine therefore says glasnost. The book does not.
Argue from the citations. Dubrovsky's references to the Soviet literature are dense through the late 1970s, thicken around 1976–81, and then stop. There is a scatter of items from 1982 — Bogomolov in Voprosy filosofii no. 7, Motorina and Semyonov in the same year — a single 1984 title, and one 1985 item, a Leningrad book on the neurodynamic mechanisms of thinking by Bekhtereva and colleagues. After that, nothing. The only 1986 references in the entire apparatus are to volume 28 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels in the Progress English edition, which is exactly what a translator would substitute at the point of translation and tells us nothing about when the Russian was written.
So the manuscript closed around 1982 or 1983, with at most light touching-up. This matters because everything a Western reader might hope for from a 1988 Soviet philosophy book is absent from it, and the absence is chronological rather than political. There is no perestroika here, no reassessment of the discipline's history, no reckoning. The words glasnost, perestroika and Gorbachev do not appear. Neither does Stalin, Zhdanov, Lysenko, Deborin, or the 1931 resolution that broke the Deborin school and installed Mitin. Neither, for that matter, does CPSU, or Party Congress, or revisionism. The book contains one citation to a Party organ: an unsigned 1977 Kommunist piece on strengthening the ties between the social, natural and technical sciences. One, in a bibliography of many hundreds of items. Whatever this book is, it is not an exercise in legitimation.
David Dubrovsky was a philosopher of mind. His Psychic Phenomena and the Brain (Moscow, 1971) and Information, Consciousness, Brain (Moscow, 1980) had argued a specific and unfashionable thesis: that the ideal is subjective reality, that it is grounded in brain states, and that the relation between the two is best understood through the concept of information. Ilyenkov held something close to the opposite. For him the ideal was not in anyone's head at all: it was the universal form of social activity, objectified in culture, in value, in language, in the norms that meet an individual before he is conscious of anything. Two decades of Soviet philosophy ran between these positions.
Dubrovsky sets the two out, in his introduction, as two legitimate research programmes — his own oriented on natural science, Ilyenkov's on the humanities — and says the line between them is "largely conventional". When he comes to the substantive treatment, in the section of chapter 1 headed "Disputes over the Problem of the Ideal in Marxist Literature", he introduces his opponent like this:
This conception of the ideal has found its most brilliant and consistent proponent in E. V. Ilyenkov, a distinguished Soviet philosopher who died in 1979. His theory has a large following and this is precisely the reason why its critical analysis is so topical.
He goes further. Ilyenkov's 1962 encyclopedia article, he writes, "gave a powerful impetus to the study of the problem of the ideal. It raised important questions that gave food to creative thought." And then, plainly: "I take this opportunity to acknowledge the great debt which I owe to Ilyenkov's works."
The argument that follows is conducted on the merits, at length, with page references to Ilyenkov's posthumous two-part article in Voprosy filosofii nos. 6 and 7 for 1979, and with his opponent quoted at paragraph length rather than in scraps. Dubrovsky's central charge is exegetical and quite serious: that Ilyenkov's reading of Marx on the ideality of the value-form will not survive an inspection of the passages. "Regrettably," he writes, "Ilyenkov did not cite the passages from Marx's Capital and Economic Manuscripts which he invoked in support of his opinion." He then cites them himself, and argues — one may think rightly or wrongly — that Marx's "purely ideal or mental form" is a mental reflection in the heads of the parties to an exchange, not a property residing in commodities.
There is heat in it. Catching Ilyenkov describing a brain "polished and recreated by labour" after insisting that the ideal is independent of the brain's states, Dubrovsky writes: "One might think there exists some other human brain which is not 'polished' and not 'recreated by labour'!" — and adds, drily, "Such mishaps are none too rare with Ilyenkov." His deepest objection is not technical at all but humane: an ideal conceived as an objective compulsory pattern of conscious volitional activity, he argues, "rules out any autonomy of a living creative individual assigning him the role of a puppet, a functional element within 'the objective compulsory pattern'."
And having said all that, he stops and concedes: "There is no denying the fact that Ilyenkov's works contain not a few sound and interesting propositions." He lists them — the analysis of cultural values, the suprapersonal status of social consciousness, the functional nature of social materiality — before delivering his verdict, which is that "Ilyenkov's basic propositions and conclusions appear to us contradictory and his general stand on the problem of the ideal untenable."
That is a philosopher's paragraph. It is not a denunciation. Nothing in these pages calls Ilyenkov an idealist, a revisionist, or an enemy; nothing appeals to a resolution, a congress or an authority; nothing suggests that the question has been settled anywhere but in the argument. Dubrovsky also records, without rancour, that the traffic ran both ways and that the loaded vocabulary was not his: Ilyenkov, he notes, dismissed the attempt to link the ideal to information theory as "naturalistic" and "pseudomaterialistic", and "This was Ilyenkov's response to my proposal to treat the mind-brain problem in terms of the information theory."
Now the finding, which is a silence.
"A distinguished Soviet philosopher who died in 1979." That is the whole of it. The book never says how Ilyenkov died, or that he had been driven from the Institute of Philosophy, or that the "large following" Dubrovsky credits him with was a following acquired against the grain of an apparatus that had no use for him. A reader who came to this book knowing nothing would take away that a well-regarded colleague died in his fifties and that his ideas outlived him.
One can be fair about why. A monograph on the category of the ideal is not the place for an obituary, and in 1982 there was no place at all where the circumstances could have been printed. But the effect is that Dubrovsky argues at length and in detail against a man whose last word on the subject was published after his death, who cannot reply, and whose inability to reply is left entirely unexplained. He notes in passing that Ilyenkov's conception "for many years has been opposed by a number of Soviet philosophers". He does not note what else was done to him. The dispute is honest; the frame around the dispute is not complete, and the incompleteness was not Dubrovsky's choice to make.
There is a second fence, and he states it himself. Introducing the whole survey, he writes that "Opinions of Soviet philosophers who have concerned themselves with the problem of the ideal in recent years are widely divergent on a number of issues" — and then immediately: "The Marxist philosophers are unanimous in the solution of basic problems related to the nature of the ideal and in the criticism of idealist and dualist conceptions of the ideal." Unanimity on fundamentals; divergence permitted on specifics. That sentence marks the exact perimeter inside which Soviet philosophy was allowed to think, and the honest thing to say is that within the perimeter the thinking was real.
The other surprise is Part Two, which is a hundred pages on Anglo-American philosophy of mind, and which is good.
Dubrovsky's subject is what he calls "scientific materialism" — the identity theory, running from Place's "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?" (1956) through Feigl's "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'" (1958) to Smart's "Sensations and Brain Processes" (1959), and on to Armstrong, Rorty, Feyerabend, Putnam, Sellars and Nagel. He read them in the originals; the footnotes cite Minnesota, Notre Dame, Oxford and the American Philosophical Quarterly. He reconstructs Ryle before demolishing him, notes accurately that Ryle's later work abandons the monism of The Concept of Mind, and gets Feigl's "raw feels" right.
What he does not do is abuse them. The word bourgeois appears seven times in the whole book; four of those are in the titles of Russian works listed in the notes, and the three in Dubrovsky's own prose are period usage for Western philosophy as a category, never a charge levelled at a named opponent. On the contrary — twice he defends the Western materialists against his own side. Of the standard Soviet dismissal, he writes that "it appears hardly justifiable to dispose of the identity theory as 'one of the varieties of modern vulgar materialism'", because vulgar materialism never posed the logical problem of the mind–brain relation and the identity theorists make it central. And of attempts to class Feigl and Smart with the idealists: "they appear to be absolutely untenable". His summary judgement is that the school "draws on vast scientific material and represents a peculiar version of the natural scientists' theoretical reflection". He then argues against it — from Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, as one would expect, but by way of argument rather than citation-as-verdict. Indeed at one point he corrects other Soviet writers' use of Lenin: "Reference to Lenin, however, is based on a misinterpretation of his views."
Here the honest report is a negative one. The Fourth International and the wider anti-Stalinist left did not answer this book, because they did not know it existed. A search of the complete English Trotsky corpus, the Bulletin of the Opposition, the run of Fourth International from 1940 to 1956, International Viewpoint, Intercontinental Press and the collected George Novack finds no mention of Ilyenkov and no mention of Dubrovsky. (One apparent hit, in International Viewpoint no. 305 for November 1998, is a different Dubrovsky altogether — a Ukrainian miner speaking at a Moscow conference on Trotsky.) The tradition tracked Lysenko closely and Zhdanov's 1947 intervention in philosophy closely; it never tracked the academic philosophers, and the argument over ideal'noe has no counterpart in its vocabulary at all.
What the tradition does supply is the standard against which a book like this should be measured, and it is not the standard a reader might guess. Trotsky wrote on the question in June 1933, two years after the Deborin school was broken, in "The Party in the Field of Art and Philosophy". He is not a libertarian there. He holds that "philosophical activity lies between art and politics, closer to politics than to art", that "In philosophy, the party itself occupies a distinct militant position", and that complaints about the canonisation of dialectical materialism "do not deserve serious attention". But he adds the sentence that makes the whole passage usable:
But least of all does this signify that in the sphere of philosophy the party can act as if all questions have already been resolved for it, and that it has nothing to expect from the further development of scientific thought.
Authority without closure. That is the line, and it is a line an official philosophy crosses the moment it decides an argument is over. George Novack, the American Trotskyists' philosopher, described the crossing in Is Nature Dialectical?: under Stalin, dialectical materialism "became scholasticised and ossified", and the Western contempt for it had been "reinforced by the arbitrary and ignorant interference of the Stalinist bureaucrats with scientific theory, along with their narrowly schematic, distorted, and dogmatic interpretation of Marxist method." Novack's image for the closed system is Henri Lefebvre's, and it is perfect: a French Communist Party official telling Lefebvre that the house of dialectical thought "is finished; there is nothing left to do but put up the tapestries."
By that test — the only test this series is entitled to apply — Dubrovsky passes. He does not think the house is finished. He thinks a major question is open, that his most distinguished colleague got it wrong, and that the way to show it is to quote him accurately and take him apart.
There is a last irony worth the reader's attention. Novack's own Elements of Dialectical Materialism, written in August 1940, holds both sides of the Soviet dispute at once and does not notice the strain. On one page: the mind of the individual "does not and cannot exist except as a function of his brain and his body" — Dubrovsky's position exactly. On another: "Nature is the primary product of material evolution; society developed out of nature and consciousness out of society" — which is Ilyenkov's. What Ilyenkov and Dubrovsky spent twenty years pulling apart, the Fourth International's philosopher had left comfortably fused. That is not a point against Novack, who was writing a short popular exposition. It is a point about what the Soviet argument was actually for, and it is the best reason to read this book: the problem is hard, it was not invented by the state, and two serious people disagreed about it for a long time.
Dubrovsky closes the book on a sentence that no functionary would have written, defending the wandering, unreliable freedom of the inner life: even where it "brings forth chimeras, castles in the air, comforting illusions, false beliefs and maniacal ideas", it "represents the essence of the restless creative human spirit, eternally seeking truth, beauty, goodness, justice and excellence."
Read it as philosophy. It is the last thing on the list of what Progress Publishers was for, and here, once, it is what they printed.