On the Accessibility of the Thing-in-itself: Kant’s Transcendentalism and Meillassoux’s Speculative Materialism

Abstract

Modern philosophy has shown an unexpected interest in materialism. Why is materialism attractive? Perhaps because of the simplicity of thought, or be­cause of the direct discernment of the truth? Among the new materialists stands out the figure of Meillassoux, who tried to justify the need to move from transcendental and phenomenological idealism to speculative material­ism. But the interest in materialism is even more unexpected among young russian researchers who became volunteers of speculative materialism without hesitation. What attracts them to materialism? The answer to this question can be obtained by analyzing the philosophy of Meillassoux. This article examines the speculative materialism of Meillassoux. His idea of contingency is com­pared with Kant’s idea of productive imagination a priori. As a result, the author concludes that Meillassoux has not found the answer to the question why laws are constant. The absolutization of factuality, on which Meillassoux insists, does not give positive knowledge about the absolute. The inconsistency of Meillassoux is that the absolute is always preceded by an anthropological process of absolutization. The author concludes that speculative materialism attracts by its theoretical simplicity, which, in turn, is based on the full and merciless deprivation the world of anthropological dimension. In the material­ism of K. Meillassoux, an inescapable longing for the absolute is expressed. The speculative materialists want to restore space and time to nature with the help of the absolute, forgetting that the dif­ference between things in them­selves and things for themselves is not based on the absolutization of time, but on the presence of subjectivity. Meillassoux refused subjectivity. He chose the absolute. For him, the subject of philosophy is not the existence of a per­son, but a certain “may-be”.