9. The Dead End of Kantianism¶
Core Argument¶
Immanuel Kant’s philosophy marks a pivotal turning point, born from the twin pressures of Rousseau’s moral awakening and the scientific revolutions of his age. Revolted by the arid formalism of Wolff’s Leibnizian metaphysics, Kant sought to rescue knowledge from the twin threats of Berkeley’s subjective idealism and Hume’s corrosive scepticism. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he argued that cognition is active, not passive: the mind imposes a priori forms—space and time—upon sense data to organise experience. He distinguished empirical knowledge from a priori knowledge, insisting that space and time are innate structures of consciousness, not derived from matter. Engels refutes this directly: space, time, and motion are the mode of existence of matter itself and cannot be abstracted from it.
Kant’s cardinal error is the unknowable Thing-in-Itself. He maintains that we can know only appearances, never things as they are. Hegel and Engels counter that appearance and essence are not separate realms; to know a thing’s properties is to know the thing itself. The Thing-in-Itself is an empty abstraction, a marker of present ignorance, not an insurmountable barrier. Kant’s distinction between Understanding (Verstand) and Reason (Vernunft) was a genuine merit, restoring dialectics as a higher logic, but his acceptance of the formal law of contradiction and his agnosticism led to fatal inconsistency.
For Kant, logical laws—such as identity—are laws of thought alone, not of things themselves; consciousness imposes them upon objects. Marxists counter that dialectics derives its laws from the real, material world. Kant’s antinomies demonstrate the contradictions that arise when formal logic is applied to experience, but he mistakenly takes this as proof of the Thing-in-Itself’s unknowability, rather than recognising contradictions as objective features of reality. Hegel showed that formal logic treats opposites as mutually exclusive, whereas identity presupposes difference, and the unity of opposites is fundamental. The contradiction of being and nothing is resolved through becoming; cause and effect must be united as interaction. Kant’s merit was reintroducing contradiction into philosophy, demonstrating it is neither arbitrary nor subjective, but his solution was trivial and agnostic. Hegel demonstrated that every actual thing contains opposed determinations. The problem of subject-object relations was finally resolved by Marx and Engels, who argued that all philosophical mysteries find their rational solution in human practice.