Kant "is defining space and time and speaking of their “transcendental ideality”. This means that “things” possess space-time determinacy only in the consciousness and thanks to the consciousness, but not in themselves, outside and before their appearance in the consciousness. Here “ideality” is clearly understood as a synonym for the “pure” and the a priori nature of consciousness as such, with no external connections. Kant attaches no other meaning to the term “ideality”.
Kant's could not overcome the notion of "social consciousness" as many times repeated individual consciousness. The social consciousness showed to oppose the individual, who assimilates it during his life and to which he summited his own will. An individual as unit of analysis does not solve the duality between between internal and external. In this view, culture becomes an external factor imposing what individuals should do, and it remains unexplained.
Hegel sees advantage (Ilyenkov, 1977: 77) in Plato who does not see ideal as something inside human mind but rather should be seen as social-collective world of ideas. Plato sees " the world of ideas (he, in fact, gives us the concept of the “ideal world”) as a stable and internally organised world of laws, rules and patterns controlling the individual’s mental activity" (Ilyenkov, 1977).
Plato's definition of world of ideas is (Ilyenkov 1997: 78): "a stable and internally organised world of laws, rules and patterns controlling the individual’s mental activity, the “individual soul”, as a special, supernatural “objective reality” standing in opposition to every individual and imperatively dictating to the individual how he should act in any given situation."
Plato acknowledge "the dependence of the mental (and not only mental) activity of the individual on the system of culture established before him and completely independently of him, a system in which the “spiritual life” of every individual begins and runs its course."
The duality between individual conscious versus everything else (in Kant) is replaced by a duality between the world of ideas versus world of things (by Plato).
Hegel goes a step further explaining that the ideal, materialized in language, rituals, customs, rights and so on; refers to the role and meaning of things in social human culture, in the context of socially organized human activity, and not in individual consciousness as proposed by Kant.
According to Hegel, it is through the assimilation of the ideal (human culture) that man become conscious of himself (he becomes human). Hegel contribution to the concept of ideal is that he includes the social organized experience/culture, seen as stable, historically cristalized in patterns, standards, and so on.
Another contribution of Hegel to the concept of ideal was in acknowledging that (Ilyenkov, 1977: 84):
"This relationship of representation is a relationship in which one sensuously perceived thing performs the role or function of representative of quite another thing, and, to be even more precise, the universal nature of that other thing, that is, something “other” which in sensuous, bodily terms is quite unlike it, and it was this relationship that in the Hegelian terminological tradition acquired the title of “ideality”.
The key limitation of Kant, Plato, Hegel is that they do not acknowledge the real world, independent of human experience, and before being expressed in human experience. For them, an "ideal" world is the world that is already assimilated a world already shaped by their activity, the world that people know. They can not explain how new concepts emerge (Ilyenkov, 1977: 82).Hegel does not talk about nature as it is, but nature as it is interpreted by man in the system of definitions established by its historically formed "language". Hegel does not recognize that when he talks about nature he is using the knowledge produced by human (natural science) and therefore it is limited to what we have already experienced.
Marx follows Hegel concept of ideal by making the differentiation between the representation of a thing and the thing that is aimed to represent. However, it is important to point out that the meaning of the concept of o ideal for Marx is the opposite than for Hegel. For Marx and Hegel something is ideal because its form does not consist in the corporeal palpable characteristics of the thing, but as a representation of another thing.
Marx goes a step further proposing that (Ilyenkov, 1977: 86): "Ideality, according to Marx, is nothing else but the form of social human activity represented in the thing. Or, conversely, the form of human activity represented as a thing, as an object." “Ideality” is a kind of stamp impressed on the substance of nature by social human life activity, a form of the functioning of the physical thing in the process of this activity. So all the things involved in the social process acquire a new “form of existence” that is not included in their physical nature and differs from it completely – their ideal form.
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