Please join us as we present our first speaker of The Philosophy Department Colloquium Series.

Sabina Vaccarino Bremner is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She works broadly in the history of philosophy, on figures including Kant, Marx, and Beauvoir, as well as on topics including ethics, social philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of science. Her work has been published most recently in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Political Philosophy, among other venues.

Title: Kant and Marx on the Constitutive Source of Transcendental Illusion

Kant holds that the very structure of cognition inevitably gives rise to illusion, one which continues even after its exposure. Yet scholars struggle to reconstruct Kant’s account of how this occurs. The consensus attributes it to reason’s ‘slide’ from its logical maxim to a dialectical use of it. But nothing in the maxim compels the slide, rendering illusion avoidable; nothing in merely logical form yields three specific transcendental ideas; and Kant restricts its dialectical formulation to only one of these three ideas. I argue these difficulties share a source: Kant locates illusion not in reason’s logical use, but in the understanding’s Analogies of Experience, which are “rules for seeking” what the relational categories supply but cannot be sensibly exhibited—substance behind the “I think”; the end of the causal chain; a whole of reciprocally determining parts. Because each application succeeds empirically while leaving the a priori demand unmet, the search perpetually reopens, where reason supplies the form of this demand, not its source. I argue that this account supplies a fundamental presupposition of Marx’s critique of capitalism: that a socially valid thought-form can be both objectively illusory, yet persist through its own exposure. Once constitutive conditions are relativized from cognition to capitalist exchange, capital appears as the hypostasized, unconditioned condition of economic value—a constitutive illusion that, unlike Kant’s illusion, can be abolished by changing the practice of capitalist exchange that generates it.