Introduction

A twenty-first century reader may first encounter Evald Ilyenkov’s works out of historical interest, but they would soon see the radical freshness of his ideas, and their relevance to contemporary debates, extending far beyond the academic sphere. Ilyenkov’s original and creative Marxist vision not only resonates with contemporary developments in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and psychology, but also seems to point the way forward for several open challenges in these disciplines. These disciplines, in turn, hardly ever self-describe explicitly as dialectical (even less as Marxist) and yet in their increasingly common confrontations with complexity, materiality, relationality, and the social and historical roots of human minds, they are beginning to recognize some degree of affinity, often kept under the surface, with dialectical thinking.

Reading Ilyenkov from a contemporary perspective, of course, is not without challenges for a non-specialist who may be interested precisely in exploring these resonances. His works, his language and allusions, are situated historically in a complex period of Soviet philosophy (Bakhurst 2023). This makes some of his most original messages less accessible and easy to appreciate than, say, someone working in embodied cognition would wish. The parallels may be missed or not properly understood.

But some interesting parallels have already been pointed out between Ilyenkov’s approach to mind, activity, personality, and ideality, on the one hand, and non-Cartesian, embodied, enactive, and ecological approaches in cognitive science, on the other (e.g., Lektorsky 2016, 2021). Some recent work within these approaches, sometimes described broadly as 4E Cognition (Newen et al. 2018), make direct reference to Ilyenkov (e.g., Di Paolo et al. 2018; Di Paolo and De Jaegher 2022).

So far, however, no systematic attempt has been made to investigate these parallels and decide whether they are anything more than superficial and whether they point to broader philosophical commitments, shared explicitly or not. Nor is there a clear statement of the limits of these parallels, the points of possible tension and whether these tensions are creative and call for new developments or whether, on the contrary, they signal serious incompatibilities.

Our purpose in this article is to begin such a discussion by confronting Ilyenkov’s overall view of life, mind, personhood, ideality, and social activity with enactive perspectives on life, mind, and language (Varela et al. 1991; Thompson 2007; Di Paolo 2018; Di Paolo et al. 2017, 2018). In doing so, we also hope to make a wider audience in the sciences of mind more aware of Ilyenkov’s philosophy as well as bringing some of these recent perspectives to the attention of Ilyenkov scholars. Other contemporary approaches, such as distributed cognition, cognitive ecologies, and ecological psychology, may be similarly compared, but we believe the enactive approach offers a particularly interesting case.

We should also note that the enactive approach involves a broad set of commitments to the embodied and practical nature of life and mind. The approach as a whole is still in development. The last decade has seen major advances and new applications, but this also means there have been some branching, differences of emphasis, and distinct styles. Here we try to remain as general as possible, but we will also enter into some specific recent developments.

In this initial intervention our focus is on highlighting and discussing three broad areas where we find parallels and complementarities (and sometimes also tensions) between Ilyenkov and enaction: 1) a non-reductionist, non-dualist perspective on life and mind, 2) the emergence of qualitative transitions in life and mind, especially instantiated through social activity and leading to the concept of personhood, and 3) the concept of the ideal. Our goal is not to be exhaustive but to convincingly show that these resonances, complementarities, and tensions are worth investigating. We proceed by contrasting the two perspectives and analysing the context and depth of apparent resonances. In the case of significant differences we ask where their roots lie and whether or not they point to dialectically resolvable divergences.

Against reductionism and for (some kind of) continuity between life and mind

Both Ilyenkov and the enactive approach reject the still-widespread view that the mind corresponds to the activity of the brain, and in particular that this activity consists in processing external stimuli and arriving at some kind of resolution mediated by internal models. The mind is not in the head for either of these perspectives. The mind consists in embodied activity involving the body and the physical world as well as the body in relation to practices, social norms, and the activity of other bodies.

For enactivists, the brain is not the repository of the mind but an organ of relation and mediation (Fuchs 2011, 2018) that coordinates the body’s engagement in sensorimotor and social loops at multiple scales. Accordingly, the brain works via the activation of resonant cell assemblies that mediate meaningful action and perception through large scale integration of neural activity across the whole brain (Varela 1995; Varela et al. 2001). This makes enactivists critical of the idea of functional localization in discrete brain regions, which is still prevalent in neuroscience. Instead, the brain coordinates resonant loops between neural assemblies and world-involving sensorimotor activity (Fuchs 2018, p. 154). Action and perception are time-extended processes sustained by the emergent dynamics between brain, body, and environment, what Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2011) calls ‘kinetic melodies’, an idea originally developed by A. R. Luria (1973, p. 176), which is itself closely associated with Nikolai Bernstein’s (2020) concept of synergism (see also Ryan and Gallagher 2020). Both enaction and Ilyenkov see in neurocentrism a literal case of misplaced concreteness, a pseudo-materialism. This is clear in Ilyenkov’s criticism that ‘Thought… cannot be secreted from the body performing it as a special ‘substance’ [like] sweat from sweat glands. Thinking is not the product of an action but the action itself, considered at the moment of its performance …’ (Ilyenkov 1977a, p. 21) as well as in the enactive insistence that the mind is not in the head but in the productive engagements between bodies and environments (Hutto and Myin 2013; Noë 2009; Di Paolo et al. 2017). In both cases we see a turn towards the concrete (Varela 1992) as the locus of the mind, the network of relations in which bodies participate and in which they realise themselves in their ongoing activity. The brain as the seat of the mind is an abstraction, a severing or narrowing down of the rich relationality of minded bodies, such that concrete enabling and constitutive relations involving the rest of the body, the environment, and others are relegated to the role of mere informational inputs.

We may say then that both Ilyenkov’s view of the mind and the enactive project insist on moving from the abstract to the concrete in the sciences of the mind.Footnote 1

Now this converging insistence may hide some differences. In Ilyenkov’s case, it is animated by a creative blend of Spinozist monism and dialectics. In the enactive case, at least in its origins, the turn towards the concrete is influenced by its attention to lived experience, mindfulness traditions, Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/2012) phenomenology of perception, as well as complex systems thinking leading to conceptual innovation such as the concepts of autonomy, adaptivity, and sense-making. Continuing with this initial emphasis a second phase of enactive theory (Di Paolo 2005; Thompson 2007; Weber and Varela 2002) appeals to the biophilosophy of Hans Jonas as a figure of inspiration for clarifying the passage from life to mind. Jonas himself was influenced by Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein (though he kept a critical attitude towards his teacher) and by Whitehead’s process philosophy. Enaction is also influenced by dialectical thinking but in subtler ways (for a discussion see Chap. 6 in Di Paolo et al. 2018), in particular as applied to the relation between a community of observers and the systems observed (which may include themselves) and in formulating the relation between organisms and environment in terms of entwined dialectics of identity and dialectics of knowledge (Varela 1991).Footnote 2 A key inspiration for The Embodied Mind, the inaugural enactivist text, (Varela et al. 1991) is Richard Lewontin’s (1983) criticism of the adaptationist program in evolutionary biology and his dialectical take on organism-environment co-definition and historical co-dependence (Varela et al. 1991, pp. 198–202, see also, e.g., Varela 1991, p. 103). Organisms are both subjects and objects of evolution, so is the enactive agent involved in walking a path laid down by the activities of others but that, in part, she also lays down herself. More recent enactive work has explicitly deployed dialectical thinking in criticising the concept of autopoiesis (Di Paolo 2018) and elaborating the categories inherent in human language as a totality (Di Paolo et al. 2018).

We see then a panoply of anti-reductionism and non-Cartesianism at play once we dig beyond the immediate convergent messages in both perspectives. It is not our job here to discuss the potential tensions between these roots. It is important to be aware of the differences between the two perspectives, particularly as concerns their history and their methods. It also pays to hold abstract or principled criticism based on these differences in abeyance in favour of a more productive exchange. Ultimately, the differences may play out as questions of emphasis, vocabularies, and broad concerns. Interestingly, in all of these we see striking resonances.

We first note that the philosophical approaches of Ilyenkov and the enactivists share an emphasis on agency and purposiveness, and in so doing, break with the hegemony around them. Both Soviet orthodoxy and dominant strands of Western cognitive science have aimed to reduce every phenomena to more basic mechanisms. There is no place for ‘purpose’ in this mechanistic vision. Purpose or teleology has often been associated with readings of Hegel and Marx in which history inevitably advances towards a final absolute. Ilyenkov vociferously criticises this view. Drawing on Marcuse, he suggests that we cannot define history as the magnanimous advance of Reason without reckoning with the ‘slavery, Inquisition, child labour, concentration camps, gas chambers, and preparation for the nuclear war’ that have been Reason’s actual materialisations (Ilyenkov 1982, p. 109). For Ilyenkov, we should not look to Reason or an absolute image of the world here, but to concrete dynamical systems. Therein lies a different understanding of purposiveness.

This turn towards dynamics and situatedness closely echoes how teleology has been approached by enactivists.Footnote 3 The theory of autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980), from which enactive theory draws heavily, treats teleology as belonging to the domain of external descriptions and puts the accent on the purely organisational aspects of living systems.Footnote 4 Any relation between life and mind becomes a matter of external descriptions and not anything intrinsic to the concrete organism. This was found to be limiting and risking internalist interpretations (Varela 2011). In contrast, Weber and Varela (2002), drawing on Kant’s critique of teleological judgement, suggested that there is an intrinsic relation between autopoiesis and teleology. Organisms not only produce themselves but do so in ways oriented towards environmental relations and the significance they hold for their continuing viability. They recognise risks and opportunities, they act accordingly, and in turn create new risks and opportunities. These relations of significance depend on the concrete realisation of the organism. Metabolic and genetic networks in bacteria, for instance, specify sugar as relevant out of a myriad ongoing physical and chemical interactions they undergo. Autopoiesis would thus entail a projective, not just an intrinsic, teleology. In order to address some gaps in this idea, Di Paolo (2005) introduced a concept of adaptivity to account for how organisms actively regulate their states and couplings in relation to their own viability limits, before they fatally cross these limits, grounding a sense of purpose in this activity. This leads to a break with the internalist readings of autopoietic theory and move the enactivist perspective from a Kantian to a Hegelian stance on naturalised purposiveness (Gambarotto and Mossio 2024).

Ilyenkov’s approach to life and teleology, while not pitched at the same technical level in terms of system theoretic concepts, is indeed similar. Though he encourages us to see everything, from economies to rivers and solar systems, in terms of their motion in networks of interactions (Ilyenkov et al. 1960b), he sees something distinctive here about living organisms and their development.

With a purely mechanical approach, the organism proved to be something quite incomprehensible, because the principle of a mechanism was the uniting (consistent synthesis) of ready-made, previously given parts; the living organism, however, did not originate through the building up of parts into a whole… each part could only be understood through its role and function in the whole, outside of which it simply did not exist, or not, in any case, as such. (Ilyenkov 1977a, p. 91)

Ilyenkov argues that life does not emerge from the assembly of parts, like a watch mechanism, and so cannot be reduced to such parts. Ilyenkov is not positing some vital force that breaks out of its material shell; he accepts that life involves factors like the presence of specific proteins in specific conditions, but suggests this is not enough. The ‘parts’ of an organism are its functions and the relations between them. These functions are mutually dependent and cannot be reduced to simpler atoms. We can only understand the functions in connection with the purposes the whole organism is pursuing in its life activity. This, again, brings us back to Hegel’s teleology, specifically from his philosophy of nature.

Resonating with the enactive story sketched earlier, teleology, for Ilyenkov, can be understood in the fact that ‘Living organisms refract the influences of the external environment through the specific organization of their bodies … as self-preserving, self-replicating and self-moving systems of synergistic effects.’ (Ilyenkov et al. 1960a; author’s translation).

Ilyenkov argues that while organisms and environment form one-another, as a river and riverbank might, there is also an asymmetry here. The organism is not simply a reflection of the environment: its organisation allows it to shape the environment to its will, even as it is shaped by it. This occurs at qualitatively different levels of complexity from plants to humans.

We encounter similar pronouncements in the enactive approach. In its initial expression, this takes the form of positing organisms and cognisers as active not only in making sense of their environments but in actually shaping them. Varela et al. (1991) draw directly from Richard Lewontin’s (1983) dialectical criticism adaptationist thinking in evolution, whereby environments are externally defined and impose problems for organisms to adapt to. Instead, organisms are, in Lewontin’s terms, both subjects and objects of evolution. Enaction, correspondingly, highlights the degree to which organisms define, select, and modify their environments at behavioural and developmental scales as well. This activity, these enactments, are at the basis of all affect and cognition and give the approach its name. Later developments formalise this active or interactional asymmetry making it a requirement for an operational approach to the concept of agency (Di Paolo et al. 2017). As much for Ilyenkov as for enactivists, the asymmetry between organisms and environments is not a mere formality, nor a matter of external labelling, but is realised materially in the activity of organisms.

This basic ‘logic’ relating adaptive self-production and self-distinction under precarious material conditions with teleology and mindedness reappears at different dimensions of embodiment (Thompson and Varela 2001), not just the organic, but the sensorimotor and social dimensions as well. Organisms produce themselves out of environmental relations (e.g., exchanges of matter, entropy, and energy) and make themselves distinct from these material flows by positing a precarious, self-sustained circular identity. This leads to a dialectical tension between the need to remain open to the environment and the risks of dissolving into it. This tension can only be navigated concretely by becoming active agents (Di Paolo 2018).

Ilyenkov also stresses these same relations at various levels:

It is as an organic need … as a cyclically self-renewing exchange of substances – that we must evidently see the first (and still nonspecific) prerequisite of the psyche. Nonspecific inasmuch as a plant also possesses it in full measure…

But at the highest levels it appears as a ‘consequence’ of the psyche, as a result of psychic activity, search activity – the active motion of the organism among bodies of the external world, among the ‘obstacles’ that impede ‘self-closure’ of the cycle of exchange. (Ilyenkov 2010)

Psyche, or mind, in part depends on my continually distinguishing myself from another body: be that another organism or an aspect of my environment, and in part depends on my organising my own activity to pursue certain purposes and doing so in part by incorporating (sometimes literally) external processes into my body. The purposes we pursue and the agents and environments we interact with develop who we are, and what we can think and feel. These in turn shape the purposes we pursue, and so on, in a complex cycle. Mind then, like life, can be characterised in terms of teleology in this processual sense. In Ilyenkov’s account, mind emerged to let us select actions to deal with a greater variety of needs and obstacles in the complex environments we inhabit.

These quickly drawn parallels already suggest that Ilyenkov and the enactive approach share a strongly non-reductionist view of life and a similar non-dualistic perspective on mind and teleology as emerging in life, yet not reducible to it.

Further investigation could flesh out the implications of these parallels. Enaction may bring a series of theoretical developments to articulate Ilyenkov’s vision of life and mind. Ilyenkov, in turn, brings a clearer Hegelian/Spinozist interpretation to the enactive project. Some of the potential benefits of this will become clearer in the following sections.

The activity of bodies and persons

In moving to a more specific understanding of human minds, two key themes seem to inform both Ilyenkov and the enactive perspective: 1) the need to move the mind from a vague realm of the ‘mental’ as internal, subjective, and non-material to the concrete, organised, and situated activity of living and thinking bodies, and 2) the inescapable historicity and sociality of human cognition and affectivity.

The enactive exploration of the first theme emphasises the active component in all kinds of perceptual activity. Drawing heavily on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, perception is conceived less within the traditional ‘visual’ model of incoming distant stimuli to be internally processed and more within the ‘tactile’ model of perceiving by acting, animating the more or less expert production of actual and virtual sensorimotor contingencies, i.e., lawful relations that obtain in different sensorimotor engagements (Noë 2004). To perceive is to master these relations into a coherent organisation, such as the way a smooth solid edge feels as one moves one’s fingers along it or the way the apparent position of a sound source changes as one turns the head.

These embodied and environmentally situated skills form our prereflective engagements with the world. Their influence is hard to articulate without a disciplined approach (such as phenomenological methods). Cases of anomalous forms of action and perception also furnish us with opportunities to better see these processes at play. Such are the cases of experiments in the radical reorganisation of the visual field (e.g., through prolonged wearing of up-down or right-left inverting goggles, Kohler 1964) or neurological disorders that underscore the differences between abstract and concrete action (Goldstein 1934/1995). In such cases, from which both Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) and enactivists (Varela et al. 1991; Noë 2004; Di Paolo et al. 2017; Gallagher 2020) draw heavily, we witness a perceptual organisation disrupted and in the process of adaptively moving to a new organisation.

The Zagorsk school for deaf-blind children, under the direction of Alexander Meshcheryakov (1979, Suvorov 2016), provided Ilyenkov with a similar opportunity to witness the processes of cognitive development magnified. The guiding of self-motion through a space where we find objects of need as well as obstacles, is effected by touch in the case of deaf-blind children. However, touch is not merely a locus of received sensations, the hand is not just a receptor.

In general, a receptor becomes an organ of the psyche only insofar as it becomes an auxiliary organ of an effector. … It is precisely here that it is necessary to analyze the establishment of the function of touch. It will be more accurate to say ‘groping’ [oshchupyvanie], because it is precisely groping that appears here as the action that is immediately ‘reflected’ within the organism in the course of its execution, as an aggregate of ‘sensations’ that are not chaotic but organized by the action. Not chaos, not a ‘flow’, but precisely an organized system of sensations – an image. (Ilyenkov 2010, p. 19)

It is striking that the bond between activity and organisation of sensations culminates, through the process of acquiring sufficient expertise, in something experienced, an image, both for Ilyenkov and for enactivists (Noë 2004; Di Paolo et al. 2017). But in both cases, the organisation does not precede the image in any transcendental, Kantian sense. Perception and organisation are enacted, brought forth by the activity and the developing (but not guaranteed) attunement between agent and world.

From an enactive perspective, the more or less successful attunement to the world results in different and changing degrees of sensorimotor mastery through processes of equilibration within networks of sensorimotor schemes (Di Paolo et al. 2017).Footnote 5 This is how a body always encounters a situation, via the conditions that enable it to enact a repertoire of relevant schemes. An image emerges not just from a singular engagement but from a history reflected in how I have learned from experience about other possible engagements with an object, the things I might do with it, but may not be interested in doing right now. The inhibition and priming of relevant schemes in favour of the one that is actually produced always colours the perceptual image. This is an idea we also see in pragmatists such as George Mead (1932) (see also Baggio 2021) and other Marxist thinkers such as Tran Duc Thao (1986). In this view, a perceptual image is always a concrete and historically situated enactment.

Ilyenkov adopts much the same view in characterising the cognitive development of deaf-blind children:

The direct sensing of these external contours of things as the goal as well as of the means–obstacles on the path to its attainment, is the image, and is the cellular form of psychic activity, its simple abstract schema.Footnote 6 The schema is then actualized in the perceptual image, and here Kant, Fichte, and Schelling were right—it becomes the schema of the actually executed act of perception of the external form… The image ‘exists’ only in the course of and during its active construction of an … executed action. (Ilyenkov 2010, p. 22)

An image is thus not stored in the brain, it is nowhere manifested in the brain. For Ilyenkov, one arrives at the perceptual situation with a schema as a mode of constructing an image. He suggests it is this schema, not the image, that is stored in the brain (ibid). Enactivists would meanwhile not theorise organisations of sensorimotor schemes as being ‘stored’ anywhere, but rather as the readiness-to-act, the shaping powers and sensibilities that a body (brain included) brings to a situation. Ilyenkov is here interested in the relative ‘crystallisation’ (Ilyenkov 2014, p. 51) of schemes across wide historical temporalities, in contrast to the enactivist accent on individual serendipitous situations. Enactivists speak of enactments: world-involving activity in which body and environment bring forth an image, a production (Di Paolo 2023). In spite of these differences, on which it does not seem Ilyenkov has put much weight, there is evidently broad agreement in both views of perception.

A more serious point of tension concerns the methodological approaches at the core of the two traditions. While enactivists draw heavily on phenomenological methods, Ilyenkov would claim that ‘Spinoza’s reasoning moves in the directly opposite direction, proceeding not from ‘the I’ but from the world and leading to the I as a ‘component part’ of this world’ (Ilyenkov 2010, p. 31). Ilyenkov is anxious that scientific analysis of our feelings and experiences will send us back to a view in which the mind is severed from the world, instead of a view of a world already rich with qualities in which we are incorporated through our sensuous life activity (Ilyenkov 2018, pp. 169–173). He argues that descriptions of experience reflect the structure of language more than the real organisation of the changing sensuous situation. For Ilyenkov, the sensual objects of perception exist in multiple complex systems of relations not immediately apparent to consciousness:

In the form of a particular sensuously perceived thing before us there always exists some system of interacting things, some regular system of their relations (i.e. the ‘concrete’), but it exists only in its fragmentary singular manifestation, i.e. abstractly. The entire difficulty of the theoretical analysis is found in the challenge of not considering the ‘relation’ between things abstractly as a special independent object and, conversely, not considering the ‘thing’ as a special object that exists outside of a system of relations to other things; the challenge is to understand every thing as an element, as a moment of some concrete system of interacting things … (Ilyenkov 2018, p. 177)

Ilyenkov’s favoured methodological approach, then, begins with analyses of systems and their development, and views episodes of lived experience as ‘moments’ of these systems. While acknowledging these methodological differences, we should remember that one central figure for enactivists here is Merleau-Ponty, who aligns with Ilyenkov in his rejection of the subject-object duality, seeking to move away from abstraction towards the concreteness of the body and of action/perception. Merleau-Ponty often displayed a dialectical method of his own (critically drawn from Hegel and Marx) by contrasting opposing views, broadly corresponding to intellectualist and empiricist approaches to behaviour, perception, and experience, to draw from this contrast a view that uncovered the shared assumptions between these opposing views in order to overcome them (see e.g., Kruks 1976; Pollard 2016).

In this respect, the enactive emphasis on lived experience is (generally) guided by a move towards concreteness as a form of keeping abstractions in check (e.g., Varela 1992) and a way to reintroduce embodied experience into discussions about the mind but avoiding intellectual reductions in terms of unsituated abstractions about experience (e.g., debates about consciousness, qualia, etc.) that a historical dialectical approach is right to reject.Footnote 7

An area within the enactive approach that has seen much development over the past decade concerns questions of social cognition and social interaction. It serves as a good example of the enactive turn towards concreteness. Cognitivism and other forms of functionalism have conceived of the question of social cognition as a problem domain like any other to be approached by an individual cogniser from their own detached perspective. What makes this domain ‘social’ is simply its subject matter and the complications it introduces to cognitive problem solving, such as the inaccessibility of the mental states of others and the need to infer them via a specifically attuned Theory of Mind or via mental simulation (Apperly 2010; Goldman 2006; Leslie et al. 2004; Keysers and Gazzola 2007). The enactive approach rejects two key premises of these views: 1) that concrete instances of cognition, or sense-making, (social or of any kind) are the sole product of a single individual agent, devoid of contact with environmental, social, historical, and interpersonal processes, and 2) that knowing or engaging others in their activity consists solely in figuring out hidden mental phenomena, which in fact are often if not directly overt, at least accessible for a non-passive agent able to engage in social interaction.

De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) introduced the concept of participatory sense-making to account for a perspective on embodied intersubjectivity and interaction built on the rejection of the above premises. Sense-making (cognition, affect, action, perception) occurs in the embodied and situated activity of cognisers and as such is subject to influences of all kinds by other agents. Such engagements may result in a proper social interaction, when the dynamics of the encounter take on a life of their own (technically, when they become operationally closed) without the participants losing their own autonomy in the process. Social interactions are not entirely under the control of any participant, as evidenced by the fact that we often want an interaction to end (as other participants very likely do too) and we don’t manage to do it (e.g., the typical sideways ‘dance’ of the narrow corridor when two people walking in opposite directions try to get past each other; their very attempts at getting out of the situation sustains the encounter).

The concept of participatory sense-making (and other related concepts forming part of the ‘interactive’ turn in social cognition research, e.g., Reddy 2008; Gallagher and Hutto 2008; see also recent calls for abandoning methodological individualism in cognitive science, Dingemanse et al. 2023) opens up a gamut of research possibilities from the formulation and testing of novel hypotheses concerning brain function (Di Paolo and De Jaegher 2012; De Jaegher et al. 2016; Hirsch et al. 2018) to the investigation of the role of interaction dynamics in cognitive and developmental phenomena (De Jaegher et al. 2010) as well as applications in psychiatry and therapeutic contexts (de Haan 2020; De Jaegher 2013; Sivertsen et al. 2022), developmental psychology (Fantasia et al. 2014), pedagogy (Lanier 2023), sports psychology (Hopper and Rhoades 2022), social science (De Jaegher et al. 2016) and performance studies (Hermans 2022; Torrance and Schumann 2019; van Alphen 2014).

Participatory sense-making, the kind of sense-making we engage in during interactions, takes many forms, from mutual sensorimotor orientations, to creative turns in conversational frames, to working together with others on a project and co-authoring our linguistic utterances. It is formulated as a broad abstract category, but all of its uses concern specific, situated concretizations that in turn have helped enrich and expand the concept, towards new theoretical developments as in the case of the enactive approach to languaging (Di Paolo et al. 2018) and the articulation of an engaged enactive epistemology (De Jaegher 2021).

While this concrete orientation is inherent in how the concept of participatory sense-making has been used, we find in Ilyenkov perhaps a more direct emphasis on historically and culturally situated activity, most notably labour, as the driver of the cognitive development and personality of the human person.

We see this emphasis throughout Ilyenkov’s oeuvre. It is particularly clear in an extended essay,Footnote 8 focusing on the psychological question: what is personality? (Ilyenkov 1984/forthcoming). Here Ilyenkov develops a thoroughly relational approach to the question:

[A human] ‘body’ is not a separate body of the ‘homo sapiens’ species, but, at a minimum, two such bodies – ‘I’ and ‘you’, merged, as it were, in one body of social and human ties, relations, interrelations …

It is not within an individual body but precisely external to it, in the interrelations of this given individual body with another like body through things located in the space between them and locking them ‘as it were into one body’, controlled ‘as it were by one soul’. In this case, it is necessarily through things, and not in their natural determination, but in their determination which is given to them through the collective labour of people, that is, it possesses a purely social (and therefore a historically transient) nature.

Understood thus, personality is far from a theoretical abstraction, but a material and tangible reality. This ‘physical organization’ of this collective body (‘an ensemble of social relations’), is a fraction and ‘organ’ of that represented by each human individual. (Ilyenkov 1984, p. 329/forthcomingFootnote 9)

The multidimensionality of human bodies, their historicity (and diversity), as well as their circular constitutive relations with a community are themes that are explored from an enactive perspective in the book Linguistic Bodies (Di Paolo et al. 2018). Human bodies do not possess only an organic/physiological dimension, but also a sensorimotor dimension, i.e., a way of acting and being in the world, a style, a set of powers and sensibilities that are only realisable in relation with the world and with others. Human bodies also exist in a social and linguistic relational dimension, sustained by acts of mutual recognition and mutual interpretation that become embedded in the very structure of utterances (a point the authors derive from Bakhtin’s work, e.g., Bakhtin 1986). The self-reflexivity these social acts afford is a necessary condition for the emergence of a personal self, which is ongoingly sustained by navigating tensions, misunderstandings, coordinations, and joint activity together with other human bodies.

Thus, for enaction and for Ilyenkov, concrete human bodies are dynamically constituted in human activity and in this human activity they acquire their own character:

Personality is not inside the ‘body of an individual’ but inside the ‘body of a human being’, which is in no way reducible to this individual body, is not constrained by its framework, but is a ‘body’ much more complicated and spatially wider, including in its morphology all those artificial ‘organs’ which humans created and continue to create (tools and machines, words and books, telephone networks and radio and television channels connecting individuals of the human species), that is, all this ‘common body’ within which individuals function as its living organs.

This ‘body’ (its internal articulation, its internal organization, its concreteness) should also be considered to understand each of its separate organs, and in their vital function, in the totality of their direct and converse ties with other similar living organs, moreover ties which are fully substantive, physical and objective. (Ilyenkov 1984, p. 332/forthcoming)

Social interaction supports the refinement of human needs, so that a person can recognise purposes unavailable to a non-human organism; for instance, creative expression (Ilyenkov 1977c). Ilyenkov draws on Vygotsky here. A baby develops sensitivity to her culture by being initiated into the activities of the culture by those who are its more competent members. This development involves qualitative breaks in which the unreflexive biological needs of the child are interrupted and brought into the dynamics of social practice (Ilyenkov 2014, p. 71). Ilyenkov retraces this process in the pedagogical work of the Zagorsk School for Deaf and Blind Children:

The child does not want to eat with a spoon. He resists and tries as before to thrust his mouth into the bowl, but they do not let him. Instead, they stick something in between his mouth and the bowl—some sort of very inconvenient object, superfluous to the old mode, a superfluous and incomprehensible ‘mediating link.’ And this ‘mediating link’ requires unfamiliar actions of him, actions the schemas for which are inscribed neither in the organic need itself nor in its object (say, in porridge) but only in the form and designated purpose of a spoon (towel, potty, table, chair, bed, etc.). (Ilyenkov 1975a)

The temporary disequilibrium experienced by the child allows him to redirect his own activity according to a more complex schema. This break proves constructive because of the metabolism of interactions between the child and those around him. Initially, it is the parent or educator who shapes the child’s activity according to existing cultural forms, then, as the child develops sensitivity to these forms to pursue their own purposes, they and their guides become ‘mutually active’ (Ilyenkov 1984, p. 333/forthcoming), shaping each-other’s activity and (in a dynamic underappreciated within enactivism) the activity of the culture at large. Personality, for Ilyenkov, is the power to open up something for others: to open new ways of affectively and practically participating in the world (ibid., pp. 356–358).

From an enactive perspective, the dialectics of disequilibrium that drive developmental processes can be found at multiple stages and throughout one’s lifetime (we never entirely stop developing, Di Paolo 2021; Di Paolo et al. 2018). These processes reach deep into the body’s sensibilities and abilities, not only those that are overtly ‘cultural’, such as language. They also help cultivate perceptual skills and attitudes (Di Paolo 2016) and ways of controlling attention and object manipulation (Di Paolo et al. 2017).Footnote 10 While these studies focus mainly on interpersonal dialectics and development, enactivists have also examined the role of artefacts in mediating social affordances (e.g., Gallagher and Ransom 2016; Rietveld et al. 2019), albeit not from a dialectical perspective. A combination of both elements: the focus on disequilibrium, breakdown, co-adaptation, and recovery, on the one hand, and on social affordances, on the other, could bring the enactive and the Vygotskian-Ilyenkovian perspectives even closer.

At this juncture, we should acknowledge the human exceptionalism that runs through Ilyenkov’s work. His thoughts about biology, among other topics, are offered as a brief prelude to what is unique about the human being. Ilyenkov suggests that we can leave behind biology when talking about human development because biology does not determine personality, only its preconditions (Ilyenkov 1984/forthcoming, 2010). A key concern here is that biological explanations of human behaviour will lead to the reification of social divisions like racism (Ilyenkov 2007). Ilyenkov’s polemics about human capacities were made as Marxist Humanism attempted to push back against the constraints of Stalinism. Ilyenkov is often identified with this movement, though he also distanced himself from Marxist Humanism for its underappreciation of science. Ilyenkov sought neither ‘abstract humanism’ nor ‘scientism’ but a dialectical synthesis of the normative and scientific, as they are salient in a particular practical situation (Ilyenkov 1971). Though it is right to criticise his anthropocentrism, we should also reiterate that for Ilyenkov it is the ensemble of concrete social relations, and not any essential characteristics, which defines the human (Ilyenkov 1982, pp. 42–47). Ilyenkov suggests that orangutans and other creatures would be persons if they could be involved in human activities (Ilyenkov 1969).Footnote 11

Enactivism may prove a helpful counterweight here in better theorising the entanglements of the different dimensions of embodiment (organic, sensorimotor, social; Thompson and Varela 2001; Di Paolo et al. 2018). These dimensions are technically defined using the enactive concept of autonomy or operational closure. The idea of multiple operationally closed systems in human bodies goes back to early work by Varela (1979). Drawing on Lewontin and Levins’s (1997) critical analysis of the relation between the social and the biological, as well as on empirical evidence, particularly from the medical sciences, it becomes apparent that these dimensions of embodiment do not stand in a neat hierarchical relation—neither causally, nor ontologically (Di Paolo et al. 2018). Even if it is true that our social embodiment demands the pre-existence of sensorimotor skills, and our sensorimotor bodies need an organic basis, in our concrete activities all of the dimensions are always involved and their relative importance varies according to circumstances. All of these dimensions involve adaptive regulation that relies on environmental and social processes as well. Moreover, there exist multiple paths along which the biological and the social transform each other in the constitution of human bodies. See, for instance, the work of Mol and Law (2004) on how bodies themselves are diversely enacted through trade-offs, e.g., in the choice of medical treatment when coping with chronic disease. For enaction, such examples exemplify what is the case in general: not a neat separation, but an entanglement of the biological and the social, out of which it is hard to separate one dimension from the other,Footnote 12 let alone set them in any relation of priority.

Under this perspective, human biological processes are not superseded, but are nevertheless enabled by social and historical processes, in this way, avoiding the risk of reifying biological differences that worried Ilyenkov.

The ideal

Ilyenkov’s theory of the ideal concerns the relation of thought to the world. Ilyenkov suggests that questions of how mental representations or concepts correspond to things in themselves have set us down the wrong course for understanding the phenomenon of ideality. For Ilyenkov, the ideal is the product of social, historical, and material activity; it is not something existing solely in individual minds or a separate ‘realm of ideas’. The ideal exists objectively in tools, artefacts, and social institutions as they orient and enable our social practice. What we represent, imagine, and think is a reflection of our engagement with these material forms.

[Culture] confronts the individual as the thought of preceding generations realised (‘reified’, ‘objectified’, ‘alienated’) in sensuously perceptible ‘matter’ – in language and in visually perceptible images, in books and statues, in wood and bronze, in the form of places of worship and instruments of labour, in the designs of machines and state buildings, in the patterns of scientific and moral systems, and so on. All these objects are in their existence, in their ‘determinate being’, substantial, ‘material’, but in their essence and origin they are ‘ideal’ because they ‘embody’ the collective thinking of people. (Ilyenkov 2014, p. 52)

We can take the Vygotskian example of children pretending that a stick is a horse. That the horse in the children’s game is fast and brave cannot be reduced to properties of the stick, nor to mental representations in the mind of each child. The stick embodies the children’s thoughts and purposes because they treat it as a horse in their shared activity. But this effect extends far beyond pretend play. The same dynamic can be traced with any artefact, such as in the ways that we treat money as holding a particular value simply by exchanging it.

Even the starry sky, which human labour barely has any impact upon, becomes the subject of human attention and contemplation only when society transforms it into a way of orienting time and space, into a ‘tool’; of life activity of the social and human body, into an ‘organ’; of its body, its natural clock, compass and calendar. Universal forms,Footnote 13 the laws of natural matter effectively reveal themselves, and therefore are recognized to the extent that this matter has really turned into building material for the ‘inorganic human body’, the ‘objective body’ of civilization, and therefore universal forms of ‘things in themselves’ directly appear to humans as ‘active forms’; of this ‘inorganic human body. (Ilyenkov 1962)

Ideal forms are always dynamic for Ilyenkov. Even as they are reified in objects, they are transformed, appropriated, reconfigured, and reimagined in every human activity. The ideal is neither object nor activity, neither bound to individual consciousness nor possible without it.

The ideal form is a form of a thing, but outside this thing, namely in man [sic], as a form of his dynamic life-activity, as goals and needs. Or conversely, it is a form of man’s dynamic life-activity, but outside man, namely in the form of the thing he creates, which represents, reflects another thing, including that which exists independently of man and humanity. ‘Ideality’ as such exists only in the constant transformation of these two forms of its ‘external incarnation and does not coincide with either of them taken separately. (Ilyenkov 2014, p. 61)

This dialectic means that the ideal describes not only what is but also what is possible. The ideal serves as a guide through the world, but also as a guide for transforming the world. We come to occupy an ever richer landscape in our life activity. Our world is furnished with objects and resonant with opportunities that could never have been envisaged by past civilisations.

The architect builds her house not just in her head but with the aid of her head by way of representation, directly on drawing paper, on the surface of a drawing board. By doing so she changes her ‘inner condition’, bringing it ‘into the open; and acting with it, as though with an object different from herself. Modifying this reified subjective (inner) image, she also potentially changes the image of the real house, that is, she changes it ideally, in its potentiality. (Ilyenkov 1962, p. 225)

What is the ‘enactive take’ on the ideal? Our previous comments on imagery and sense-making are relevant here. Sense-making, as a broad category of the mind, as a process involving bodies and world, describes the active relation of non-indifference to the tendencies manifested in the world, whether already actualized or not. We care about what may happen and in our sense-making what may happen falls along lines of distinction that have been incorporated into our bodies through our biological, social, and personal history: desirable/undesirable, good/better, bad/worse, sooner/later, more/less, closer/farther, and so on. These categories in-form (literally give shape to) our perceptions and our interactions. They also in-form the world in that sense-making happens in action and not inside the head or in a purely subjective realm. This historical, worldly, and categorial orientation of sense-making is not yet the ideal as such. But it is not entirely unrelated to it. For now, we may simply state that sense-making is an ontologically capacious concept. It opens the possibility of theorising the ideal without abandoning the enactive rejection of dualism.

While no articulated enactive theory of the ideal currently exists, several recent interventions point in a promising direction. In his recent work on the entanglement between the arts and the human mind, Alva Noë (2023) explores various examples of the entwined relations between lived practices and their institutionalisation, e.g., dancing and choreography, uses of pictures and pictorial art, languaging and writing. While focused on the arts and defending the thesis that ‘art is in the mind’ whether we engage in artistic practices or not, Noë examines concrete instances of the relation between traditions, technologies, institutions, practices, and ways of thinking and seeing the world that are applicable more broadly. For instance, while the enactive approach (thanks in large part to Noë’s own work) is well-known for criticising the pictorial view of perception and embraces a more involved and practical understanding of perceptual skills, Noë acknowledges the allure of the pictorial view and offers an enactive interpretation:

Pictorialized ways of thinking about vision refuse to die not because visual phenomenology is pictorial, after all, truly, but also not because we are victims of a metacognitive illusion according to which we mistakenly believe that visual phenomenology is pictorial, when it isn’t. No, picture consciousness won’t die rather because we live in a picture world, and because we have lived in a picture world our species life long. We have learned to use our fluency with pictures not only to think about what seeing is, but to see. We literally see with pictures, sometimes at least, just as we may sometimes literally think with words or with notations. (Noë 2023, p. 57)

We engage in pictorial practices, e.g., in dealing with images on flat surfaces. As a consequence, we develop pictorial visual skills, which in turn shape a particular way of seeing the world. Here we encounter an enactive engagement not explicitly focused on the question of the ideal, but sufficiently concerned with the shaping powers of social practices to eventually lead to this question.

Analogous observations in which social and institutional practices shape the mind have been made by enactivists in the past. In approaching the question of how we sometimes theorise about the mental state of others, even if our primary form of social engagement is not built upon such theorising, Gallagher and Hutto (2008) propose a developmental link between narrative practices and the development an understanding of the norms that enable children to make sense of actions in terms of reasons. Gallagher (2008) and Di Paolo (2016) examine the social roots of detached perceptual styles, such as being able to see an object as an object, with geometric features, colours, surfaces that may or may not be seen directly, etc., as opposed to seeing it with a practical attitude, merely in terms of affordances. Following work by Émile Durkheim and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, John Stewart (2014) argues for a strong relation between social forms and conceptual forms (such as the Kantian categories of space, time, quality, quantity, causality, and so on) linked via processes of abstraction and in insidious ways about which we have not clear, everyday consciousness, but are nevertheless enacted in our practices themselves.

One example that resonates with Ilyenkov’s thinking on the ideal—particularly his Spinozist reflections on the construction of a circle, (Ilyenkov 1977a, pp. 69–70; see also Oittinen 2005)—is the increasing overlap between enactive thinking and mathematical pedagogy research. Dor Abrahamson and his team have produced several empirical studies of the relations between hand and eye movements, gestures and speech, peer interactions, diagrams, technology, and discourse, in the acquisition of mathematical concepts (see e.g., Abrahamson 2022; Abrahamson et al. 2022). Related work on embodied and material entanglements in mathematical education (de Freitas and Sinclair 2014) follows seminal work by Gilles Châtelet on diagram making, gestures, and mathematical concepts, with nods to Ilyenkov and enaction, and broadly resonant with both. And we find similar references in the dialectical-Spinozist work of Wolff-Michael Roth (2010, 2020).

A more direct resonance is offered in Di Paolo et al. (2018). The resonance is unsurprising since the work is partly inspired by Ilyenkov’s. After presenting a dialectical model that describes increasingly concretised forms of social agency, culminating in languaging, the authors elaborate several implications of this model for more ‘traditional’ concerns in linguistics and philosophy of language such as the understanding of symbols, grammar, objectification, and so on. In all of these cases, the model permits the articulation of an embodied, enactive understanding of these notions in terms of dialectics of spontaneity and sedimentation, present in all human practices and all levels, from the familiar speech recognizable among family and friends, to the reification of normative frameworks and institutions. Citing Ilyenkov and Thao, the authors argue that the ideal (or the realm of ideality):

emerges as metastable patterns or reifications in this ongoing confrontation between world, practices, norms, and bodies … For it is not the material object whose presence is realized by the objectifying attitude (this would imply some kind of naive idealism) but the object as subtending a network of relations to a broad set of categories that have been established by past social practice. In other words, the socially concretized object exists in its relations of form, kind, number, measure, value, etc.—relations, in other words, of ideality. These relations do not reside in the minds or brains of individuals (this would imply some kind of naive materialism) but in the ongoing circulation between practices, world, and linguistic bodies.

When ideal relations are taken in isolation, reified as such, they form the basis for abstractions. Among relations between abstractions we encounter ideal truths, such as those of geometry or algebra. Ideal truths and images, in turn, alter social practices and orient the transformation of the material world. (Noë 2023, p. 207)

These reflections should be taken as an opening and not as an established and fully articulated proposal. Together with the other examples, they are indicative of the direction enactivists are currently taking on questions related to the ideal. Further work is needed to address the specific kinds of practices emphasised by Ilyenkov, particularly labour and the mediation of material/cultural artefacts, though some enactive work has begun to look into these issues too (Di Paolo et al. 2023; Gallagher 2021).

From an Ilyenkovian perspective, however, enactivists have undervalued the peculiar type of normativity that is formed through human social recognition: through the systems of rules and meanings internalised as the intentionality of a ‘collective that has formed around a certain common task’ (Ilyenkov 2014, p. 71). This makes human sense-making inherently bound up with the ideal, partially validating Ilyenkov’s anthropocentrism. What enactivists would say—and this is ultimately compatible with the rest of Ilyenkov’s philosophy—is that there are indeed ‘qualitative jumps’ in the kinds and norms of agency and sense-making. But these jumps are compatible with the continuity of life and mind, provided this is understood not in a reductive sense, but as a rejection of dualisms that erase the mutually constitutive links between life, mind, and society.

Conclusions

We have explored and explicated several parallels between Ilyenkov’s philosophy and the enactive approach to life and mind. Both perspectives share significant convergences and complementarities, notably in their non-reductionist, non-dualist views on life and mind, in thematising the qualitative transitions in sensorimotor, social, and personal dynamics, and (potentially) in the approach to the question of the ideal. We think these findings encourage further engagements by embodied cognitive scientists with Ilyenkov’s thought as well as informing Ilyenkov scholars about relevant research on embodied cognition.

Where we find contrasts we suggest these may in part amount to differences of emphasis and vocabulary understandable in the historical context of each approach (e.g., Ilyenkov’s anti-biologism in the context of crude, reductive scientistic materialism). This does not mean that other, more important differences may not still surface with further examination. As we noted, the philosophical genealogy of each project presents some overlaps but also various contrasts.

In particular, we think that the enactive approach stands to benefit from incorporating various elements of Ilyenkov’s approach to the ideal. The enactivist interventions mentioned in the previous section emphasise the role of social practices, labour, and culture but remain dispersed and have yet to be arranged systematically into a coherent perspective on the ideal as enacted in social activity. Di Paolo et al.’s (2018) vindication of the continuity between life and language serves as a basis for this task. In their comments on the objectifying attitude and symbols (pp. 198–208, 293), they recognise that it is not simply abstract language, but language entangled with labour and other practices that give rise to the ideal. Ilyenkov’s work serves as a framework for advancing on this task.

We note that cognitive science in general would benefit from Ilyenkov’s simultaneous focus on mind as concrete embodied activity and on the historicity, relationality, and cultural-embeddedness of personhood, and the domain of the ideal. While existing research in embodied cognition explores some of these aspects, it does not encompass them all. This is likely due, in part, to the prevalence of a reductionist and individualist methodology within mainstream cognitive science, and indeed sometimes within embodied cognitive science itself. To study complexity, historicity, metastable wholes, changing relations, and tensions, cognitive science must furnish itself with better tools. Dynamical systems concepts have been helpful, although their adoption remains limited against the overwhelming use of linear, reductive, and mechanistic thinking. Dialectics is, in our view and in view of Ilyenkov’s work, increasingly necessary if embodied cognitive science is to meet its open challenges without falling into the pitfalls of uncritical abstraction and misplaced concreteness.

These tensions are not new. Marxists have historically often either rejected science (emphasising its ideological nature) or fallen into reductive scientism which un-dialectically maps topics of Marxism onto scientific questions, as in Soviet DiaMat. Ilyenkov, better than many of his contemporaries, avoids these pitfalls: drawing on Marx’s method in critically assessing scientific concepts and their import for everyday life.

For Ilyenkov (1982, pp. 69–70), there ought to be no gap between ‘everyday thought’ and ‘scientific thought’; even the work of a physicist can be improved if we trace how it is shaped by and shapes our social relations and our orientation of everyday situations. Or as Varela (1992, pp. 97–98) says: ‘the proper units of knowledge are primarily concrete, embodied, lived. This uniqueness of knowledge, its historicity and context, is not a ‘noise’ that occludes the brighter pattern to be captured in its true essence, an abstraction. The concrete is not a step towards anything: it is how we arrive and where we stay’.

At the same time, we should not strive to create ‘a picture or system of the world as a whole’ (Ilyenkov and Korovikov 2019) because such a picture would fail to follow the dynamic interconnections of this world. Reaching the end of scientific inquiry (as Peirce called it) would not amount to a unified representation of the world, but a sensitivity to its dynamics and possibilities, as we find ourselves in its midst. Of course, for Ilyenkov, this regulative ideal was Communism (Ilyenkov 2017).