2025 Vol. 44. №1

It was not until German Idealism that philosophy briefly regained the importance it had in antiquity. This is indicated precisely by the “peripeteia” in the concept of experience. When Kant and Hegel write about experience, they mean quite different things on the other. Kant’s concept of experience is law-like, invariant and rigid. Only for this reason can it form the basis for a critical reflection on the validity of knowledge. However, Hegel’s analysis of object experience “dynamises” Kant’s concept in various ways: firstly, he provides an interpretation of the process of how perception and its contents ultimately become the “play of forces” via the life of things. Secondly, Hegel works out the self-referentiality of the subject in this process of experience. Finally, Hegel shows how the experience of objects refers beyond itself to more complex forms of knowledge. In the chapter “Power and Understanding” of his Phenomenology of Spirit he undertakes a subtle differentiation of what Kant calls “objective cognition” and shows, on the one hand, which process is already necessary in order to grasp a thing even sensually. On the other hand, he analyses the different levels of experience that are already involved in the simple process of perception. The authors analyse this process as a silent dialogue between Kant and Hegel and show why Hegel’s concept of experience can claim to contribute more to the understanding of man than Kant’s.

The history of the reception and interpretation of Neo-Kantian ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shows the special role played by those who took a negative stand with regard to Neo-Kantianism and sought to dissociate it from and oppose it to Kant’s legacy. A prominent place among the latter was occupied by Georgy V. Plekhanov, most of whose works were fiercely polemical. Highly rating Kant’s works, in which he even found some coincidences with materialism, Plekhanov for a number of years engaged in polemics on philosophical and political issues with the German Neo-Kantians and Eduard Bernstein, who shared many of their views. Calling Neo-Kantianism, after Friedrich Engels, “a step backwards” from Kant’s philosophy, he argued that Neo-Kantians had misunderstood Kant’s philosophy and, in advocating a return to Kant’s theoretical philosophy in order to use it to refute contemporary materialism, had distorted Kant’s doctrine. Plekhanov’s so-called “defence” of Kant against Neo-Kantians should not be understood and accepted literally. Being a Marxist, Plekhanov tried to defend above all the views of Marx and Engels by revealing the flaws in the Neo-Kantian interpretation of Kant. Although he himself in some ways misinterpreted Kant, his views command some interest today because many of them played a certain role in the perception of Kant in the Soviet and post-Soviet times and were reflected in the discussions of the Kantian philosophy as a whole, especially its fundamental concept of the “thing-in-itself”.