Semiotic Metatheorizing: “Ideal-Real” as a Theme of a “Dialogue” between Yuri Lotman and Evald Ilyenkov

The author is engaged in metatheoretical research on the basis of Yuri Lotman’s semiotics of culture, with the aim of achieving the necessary step “theory → method” required by the development of contemporary Russian philosophy of culture. The paper provides evidence for the possibility of “cross-linking” Yuri Lotman’s semiotics of culture and Evald Ilyenkov’s dialectics of the “ideal”. Without this, categorical metatheorizing in relation to invariant models of the semiotics of cultural text, such as “ideal construction” and “real text”, would be difficult. The article reveals a methodological-semiotic variant of the semantization of the relation “ideal construction - real text” in Lotman’s semiotics of culture, according to which the “ideal model” is hidden in a “concrete text”. The author has reached a number of conclusions: 1) In the context of the analysis of cultural ontology and philosophical epistemology, the interpretation of the relationship “ideal construction - real text” indicated in Lotman’s semiotics of culture is possible; 2) Ilyenkov’s dialectics theory due to the discovery of common essential characteristics with Lotman’s semiotics (interweaving of dialectics and cultural problems) represents a philosophical tradition that has the potential of a valid and justified productive extrapolation into the space of Russian philosophy of culture.