The Antinomies

FIRST ANTINOMY

- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Are some questions impossible to answer?

To demonstrate the limits of human reason Kant showed that, with respect to certain questions, reason leads us into contradictions, or antinomies. For example, it is clear that the world must have had a beginning in time, because if it didn't an eternity would have been completed by now. But an infinite series of times cannot be completed. So the world must have had a beginning in time. This is the thesis.

On the other hand, the world cannot have had a beginning in time, for any beginning must have been preceded by an earlier time, and that by an earlier time, and so on ad infinitum And so the world cannot have had a beginning in time. This is the antithesis. just goes- to show that the concept of "the world," thought of as a totality, goes, beyond the realm in which our reason can operate. We cannot take a stand outside the world and look at it.

And there must be freedom in the world, because if every event had a cause there would be an infinite series of causes that could never have got started (as Aquinas had argued). But there cannot be freedom in the world, because a free event - an event without a cause - is impossible, since we know that every event has a cause. And so we find again that we can prove both the thesis and its antithesis, that there is freedom and that there is not. And so our reason runs up against a contradiction and can proceed no further.

To Kant these antinomies meant that some ideas--God, the world, the free self-are transcendental. They apply to the realm that lies beyond our human experience. Though we are forced by the nature of our minds to entertain these ideas-we have to believe there is a God, a world, and a self that is free (and therefore morally responsible)-still we cannot know anything about them, for the concepts and categories which constitute our minds apply only within the world of our experience, the phenomenal world. We can't prove that these things do exist- but we can't prove they don't! In this way Kant "limits reason to make room for faith." But is Kant right? Is it really impossible to know anything about God, freedom, and the cosmos (the world thought of as a totality)? If so, of what use are theologians, psychologists, and astronomers?

Bibliography

Hartnack, Justus. Kant's Theory of Knowledge, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1967,

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, St. Martin's Press, Inc., New York, 1965.

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by J.M.D. Meikeljohn, London: Everyman's Library, Dutton, New York,1855.