Seminar “German and Russian Neo-Kantianism”

Georgy Plekhanov in the last years of the nineteenth century accused the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant of contradictions: on the one hand, Kant recognized that things-in-themselves objectively exist and their influence causes sensations, on the other hand, Kant called things-in-themselves inaccessible for the senses. G.V. Plekhanov writes that the epistemological scholasticism of Kantianism is based on the erroneous opposition between the unknown of the thing-in-itself and the knowledge of the result of the action of things-in-itself on people. Plekhanov was convinced that the phrase “the sensually non-perceptible influences people in such a way that people have sensory perceptions” (other versions of the phrase: sensations are caused by something that does not cause sensations; the imperceptible substrate of sensations) is a phrase characteristic of subjective idealists. Denial of Kantianism and recognition of materialism, writes G.V. Plekhanov, consists in a statement about the sensory perception of what, when exposed to people, causes sensory perceptions.