Culture or cultivation. E. V. Ilyenkov on the contradictions of the educational process

This article, written on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of E. V. Ilyenkov, problematis es one of the key motifs of his philosophical work: the process of the formation of human subjectivity and subjectivity. Through the prism of G. Simmel's philosophy of culture, it is possible to raise questions about the relationship between the inner personal life of the individual and the objectively alienated forms of culture of modernity. The connection of this concept with the works of G. Hegel and K. Marx is considered, as well as its shortcomings caused by the peculiarities of the methodological position of the “philosophy of life”, which are related to the failure to achieve its own foundations in the development of theoretical concepts of alienation and reification, while generally correctly fixing the basic definitions at the level of phenomenology. It is shown that the common understanding of the pedagogical experience at the Zagorsk boarding school, which Ilyenkov generalised and raised to a philosophical level in a number of his psychological and pedagogical works, turns out to be abstract and onesided, reduced to "theories of the environment" and in adequately reflects the actual results obtained. In order to realise the practical and theoretical achievements of pedagogical work presented in the legacy of E. V. Ilyenkov, a thoughtful reference to the dialectical tradition of classical philosophical thought and a rethinking of its established assessments in the context of the development of materialist dialectics is required.