Subject: A Cosmology of the Spirit
Date: Tue, 7 May 1996 16:46:51 -0400 (EDT)


	Writing a summary of Evald Ilyenkov's aricle "A Cosmology of the 
Spirit" I consulted a few contemporary works on the origin and nature of 
the universe.  After all, Ilyenkov wrote this article in the 1950s (it 
was found only recently) and who knows, I thought, perhaps modern science 
has found scientific explanations to the problem he was concerned with 
philosophically: the rotation of universal matter and what place if any 
thinking matter has in this process. I have found that the question is 
still open.  According to modern physics only two possibilities exist: 1) 
the universe is "open" and will expand infinitely while matter will 
gradually run out of its supplies of nuclear energy and become cold and 
motionless; 2) the universe is "closed" and at some point will contract 
back into a singular state of infinite density.  As to our place in the 
universe, here is some final reflections on these alternatives by Steven 
Weinberg, the Nobel Prize Winner for Physics:

	"However all these problems may be resolved, and whichever 
cosmological model proves correct, there is not much of comfort in any of 
this. It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some 
special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a 
more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to 
the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the 
beginning......It is very hard to realize that this all (the view of the 
US countryside from the plane - V.B.) is just a tiny part of an 
overwhelmingly hostile universe.  It is even harder to realize that this 
present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early 
condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable 
heat.  The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems 
pointless.

	But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is 
at least some consolation in the research itself.....The effort to 
understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human 
life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy" 
(_The Fist Three Minutes_).

To me, Weinberg's words tell more about his society than the universe. 
Perhaps, the same applies to Ilyenkov's response to the riddle of human 
existence in cosmos. It's up to you to decide. 

	The article is written in a repetitively defensive style.  No 
wonder. It was the time of the almost complete destruction of 
professional philosophy in SU. In 1955 Ilyenkov was accused in 
"Hegelianism." The oral chronicle of the philosophy department in Moscow 
State U. has preserved the following episode from the accusatory speech 
of the Dean who having asked: "Where are Ilyenkov and Korovikov dragging 
us to! They are dragging us into the realm of thinking!" immediately 
received a reply from the student audience: "Don't be afraid, nobody 
could ever drag YOU over there!"

Evald Ilyenkov (1924-79) was one of the small minority of the Soviet 
philosophers who have the credit of preserving Marxist philosophical 
tradition in the country against the crowds of the vulgar philosophers of 
the bureaucracy. It is the latter who now provide "philosophical" 
justification for the ideological about-face of their old bosses.  
Ilyenkov's last unfinished book was  _Lenin's Dialectics and the 
Metaphysics of Positivism_ . It was published in 1984, just a few years 
before the slogan "moral is what economically useful" was painted on the 
banner of capitalist restoration.

Vladimir Bilenkin


			Evald Ilyenkov

		"A Cosmology of the Spirit:

	An Attempt to Establish in General the Objective Role of 	
Thinking Matter in the System of Universal Interaction

	(A Philosophical-poetical phantasmagoria based on the 	
principles of dialectical materialism)"


		 
I.  As there is no thinking without matter qua substance so there is no 
matter without thinking qua its attribute. Here lies the principle 
difference of dialectical materialism from mechanical.  According to the 
latter, thinking may not exist at all  - because it is more or less an 
exception, a product of a fortunate confluence of conditions - without 
any consequence for matter in general. 

II.  Thinking brain is the highest form and product of matter.  
Philosophy cannot posit even a possibility of a more highly organized 
form without making philosophy itself impossible or ending up in 
positivist skepticism and agnosticism. Thinking brain is thus the 
absolute upper limit in the motion of matter. And since true infinity 
cannot be infinitely progressive (bad infinity) the mind necessarily 
dissolves back into more elementary states in the downward part of each 
cycle in the eternal rotation of matter. In this grandiose rotation 
without the beginning and the end, universal matter neither loses any of 
its attributes nor acquires any new ones.  As an attribute, thinking, for 
some reason, is one of the necessary links in this cyclic and circular 
motion of matter.  In thinking brain, matter reaches the highest point of 
its development followed by its return to more elementary forms, down to 
an undifferentiated state of the purely mechanical movement of elementary 
particles.

III. Every concrete form of existence has its beginning and its end. At 
some point in the future, mankind will cease to exist.  The question: 
Under what conditions life will necessarily cease to exit? presents 
theoretical interest. Thinking beings can in principle survive the cold 
death of the universe by creating necessary conditions for life within a 
limited space. But they cannot survive the immense temperatures of the 
cosmic firestorm which marks the beginning of each new cycle in the 
rotation of matter.  Thus the necessary end of thinking matter coincides 
in time with the rebirth of the dying universe.  The conditions for the 
two events coincide too. But so far the problem of the thermal death of 
the universe and that of the necessary end of thinking beings have been 
considered separately. 

Physics and astronomy can explain the process of the thermal death but 
not the process of renewal of the universe.  Yet such natural process 
must exist and take place constantly.  Without it the universe could not 
be reproduced in eternity. If such process does not exist, then "God" 
does.  The problem is to understand how the energy dispersed in 
intergalactic space gets concentrated again in the form of 
high-temperature gas nebulae which will again produce suns, planetary 
systems, etc.

The hypothesis is:

Could it be that this reversal takes place through the conscious 
intervention of thinking beings and that without them this process is 
impossible and unthinkable?  This hypothesis does not violate a single 
principle of dialectical materialism. Thinking remains a part of the 
natural process of the motion of matter, conditioned by it but also 
reciprocally affecting it. Thinking is not an accident of this process 
but an "internally posited" condition of its realization. Thinking matter 
is considered from the point of view of the universal process of 
quantitative-qualitative transformations of the forms of motion.  As one 
of such forms, thinking is a result of these transformations and 
facilitates them in its own turn. And since thinking matter is the 
absolutely highest product of universal development it is reasonable to 
suggest that in the process of the eternal reproduction of the universe 
it plays some special role  which other, less complex forms of matter 
cannot play. Solar energy is not just wasted for warming up the space but 
is stored in the qualitatively highest form of matter and then is used as 
a "trigger," a "detonator" to initiate a process of regeneration of the 
dying worlds. 

Thinking then is a necessary mediating link, the "effective cause" which 
makes possible the rejuvenation of the universe by reactivating the 
infinite stores of "tied up motion", similar to what we now achieve by 
nuclear reaction. Theoretically this is not impossible.  The destruction 
of the infinitely small structural unit of matter produces the 
proportionally infinite quantity of energy which confirms the idea of 
Leibniz that the destruction of the smallest speck would result in the 
collapse of the Universe. 

This event can be pictured as follows. At some very high point of its 
development reached by the time when the universe is near the state of 
its thermal death, mankind or some other collective of thinking beings 
intentionally creates a cosmic catastrophe that has a character of a 
chain reaction and leads to a rebirth of the dying universe. By this 
mankind pays back its "cosmological debt" to nature who gave birth to 
thinking spirit. "Its self-sacrifice becomes a truly creative act which 
turns the dark icy deserts of space into the new white-hot masses of 
matter which will become the cradles for new life, new thinking spirit 
immortal as matter itself."

	"The death of the thinking spirit becomes then its immortality. 
In the infinitely distant future, new beings, in whom nature will develop 
thinking spirit, will contemplate, as we now, the starry skies with the 
proud awareness that these cosmic worlds owe their existence to the 
long-gone thinking spirit and its self-sacrifice.... 
	In contemplating eternal nature, man - as any other thinking 
being - will be proud of himself, of the cosmic magnitude of his 
universal-historical mission, of the thinking being's place and role in 
the system of universal interaction....
	It is clear that thinking spirit will be able to fulfill this 
mission only at the summit of its development....which will be possible 
to achieve only on the basis of a truly human, classless society in which 
spiritual and material culture will fully flourish....
	For us, who live at the dawn of humanity's bloom the struggle for 
this future remains the only real form of serving the highest goals of 
thinking spirit."

			The end





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