Kant in the USSR: Asmus and Ilyenkov on the dialectics of reason

• Published in: Studies in East European thought
• Main Author: Azeri, Siyaves
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 15.07.2025
• ISSN: 0925-9392; 1573-0948
• DOI: 10.1007/s11212-025-09750-w

Although prominent figures in Soviet philosophy, such as Valentin Asmus, criticized Kant for limiting his project to epistemology and treating contradiction solely as formal-logical, the primary critique within the Soviet tradition stemmed from a substance-materialist perspective, focusing on his oscillation between idealism and materialism and the resulting agnosticism. Evald Ilyenkov, however, bases his criticism of Kant on the latter’s rejection of the identity of thinking and being, which amounts to a severance of thought and world, and of subject and object. Ilyenkov’s approach implies that Kant’s dismissal of ontology in favour of epistemology is not a consequence of his metaphysical commitments concerning the existence of matter and the claim regarding the unknowability of the thing-in-itself, but that this dismissal and the alleged unknowability of things-in-themselves are the necessary result of his rejection of the unity/identity of thinking and being. Furthermore, Kant’s consequent ideal of the non-contradictoriness of the language of knowledge, which has informed several generations of philosophers from Neo-Kantians to logical positivists, is another manifestation of his dualism and renders thinking impossible.