<p>This paper examines Ilyenkov’s views on the relationship between language, practical activity, and the ideal. It addresses three key aspects of this relationship: 1) the distinction between philosophy and the sciences that study language; 2) the dialectical relationship between labour and language and its role in the production of the ideal; and 3) the significance of this understanding of the relationship between language, practice, and thought in the psycho-pedagogical approach of cultural-historical activity theory. The main argument advanced in the paper can be summarized as follows: for Ilyenkov, philosophy is the study of the objective laws of cognition of reality, which cannot be discovered or deduced through the analysis of language. Philosophy is not linguistics. Nevertheless, language plays a necessary role in Ilyenkov’s account of philosophy’s true object, the ideal: language is an internal mediation of human activity in its transformation of the material world. Language is not the producer of meaning, but human practice, which has labour as its elementary form. Language itself is a consequence of labour, but the relationship between the two is dialectical: the consequence becomes the cause, and vice versa. Once language emerges as a product of practice, it elevates this activity to a new level by enabling a greater detachment (and thus further control) not only from the object but also from the schema of our activity toward it. This, along with its social-historical mnemonic role, is the fundamental function of language according to Ilyenkov’s conception of the ideal as an essential component of human activity. Therefore, in abstraction from practical activity, language ceases to be a medium of the ideal and becomes a purely material or psychological (non-specifically ideal) phenomenon. Then, far from being a tool for cognition and the formation of the mind, it becomes an obstacle, a fetish.</p>