The objective truth of knowledge and the nature of the ideal in philosophy of culture

The article analyzes the urgent research problem of understanding the nature of the ideal, intangible phenomena such as moral imperatives and cultural norms, law and mathematics. The paper addresses the issue of their origin and the place of their existence, their relationship with the material world, and the meaning of the objective truth of knowledge. Like K. Marx, who was able to grasp that value is labor and neither the property of the product nor a psychic projection of the product, E.V. Ilyenkov apprehended that the ideal is human activity, a process of human transformation of the material world. Contrary to the dialectical materialist understanding of the ideal, E.V. Ilyenkov exemplifies a number of reductionist theories both in the Soviet Union and in the West. Opponents of E.V. Ilyenkov, for example D.I. Dubrovsky, relegated the ideal to a property of the somatic brain. In addition, E.V. Ilyenkov draws attention to the neo-positivist theories, identifying the perfect with the language, in particular to constructions of M. Heidegger, where the being reveals itself and exists only in language.