A szellem kozmológiája. Evald Iljenkov spirituális materializmusa
A Cosmology of the Spirit: Evald Ilyenkov’s Spiritual Materialism

Summary/Abstract: Evald Ilyenkov wrote his essay A Cosmology of the Spirit at the beginning of his career, in the early 1950s; it was published only in 1988, almost a decade after his death. From the early 2000s onwards, it became one of the author’s most frequently quoted and contested writings. The topics and questions addressed in the text concern a central problem of materialist ontology: the organic relationship between matter and spirit. Ilyenkov offers a specific cosmological hypothesis that links the emergence of earthly life and human intelligence with the entropic nature of the material universe and the historical achievements of communism. According to the philosopher, the true goal of communism is not simply the establishment of a just society without exploitation, but a courageous confrontation with the inevitable “heat death”, that is, the annihilation of the universe. Humanity must sacrifice itself, in other words commit collective suicide, in order to mobilise anti-entropic energies that may offer hope for the revival of the perished cosmos. This may seem a phantasmagoria, as Ilyenkov himself clearly saw; yet if we take seriously Spinoza’s concept of substance, based on the coexistence of matter and spirit, together with Engels’s statements on the dialectics of nature, we may still allow for the emergence of rational, intelligent beings somewhere and sometime in the infinite cosmos. They may then begin again the building of a society that is free and just in every respect.

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