3) What objective and material forms can the ideal assume?

According to Ilyenkov, the ideal has to be materialized and objectified in order to be transmitted and developed. Some examples are: grammar, laws, books and so on.

The ideal forms of the world are, according to Hegel, forms of activity realised in some material. If they are not realised in some palpable material, they remain invisible and unknown for the active spirit itself, the spirit cannot become aware of them. In order to examine them they must be “reified”, that is, turned into the forms and relations of things. Only in this case does ideality exist, does it possess present being; only as a reified and reifiable form of activity, a form of activity that has become and is becoming the form of an object, a palpable thing outside consciousness, and in no case as a transcendental-psychological pattern of consciousness, not as the internal pattern of the “self”, distinguishing itself from itself within itself, as it turned out with the “Fichtean philosopher” (Ilyenkov, 1977: 88).

“Ideality mainly characterises the idea or image insofar as they, becoming objectivised in words” [entering into the system of socially evolved knowledge which for the individual is something that is given for him. – E.V.I.], “in objective reality, thus acquire a relative independence, separating themselves, as it were, from the mental activity of the individual,” writes the Soviet psychologist S. L. Rubinstein.(Ilyenkov, 1977:79)


Ilyenkov argues that "the image is objectivised not only in words, and may enter into the system of socially evolved knowledge not only in its verbal expression. The image is objectivised just as well (and even more directly) in sculptural, graphic and plastic forms and in the form of the routine-ritual ways of dealing with things and people, so that it is expressed not only in words, in speech and language, but also in drawings, models and such symbolic objects as coats of arms, banners, dress, utensils, or as money, including gold coins and paper money, IOUs, bonds or credit notes." (Ilyenkov, 1977:79)


Hegel proceed (accroding to Ilyenkov, 1977: 81) proposing the the ideal "confronts the individual as the thought of preceding generations realised (“reified”, “objectified”, “alienated”) in sensuously perceptible “matter” – in language and 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 “present being” substantial, “material”, but in their essence, in their origin they are “ideal”, because they “embody” the collective thinking of people, the “universal spirit” of mankind."