Notes on <Kant's Transcendental Idealism> - The Antinomy of Pure Reason

2020-07-17 0 views

The Antinomies: Some Preliminary Considerations

The conflict of reason with itself has roots in reason’s demand for an absolute totality of conditions for any conditioned. This is derived from the principle of sufficient reason that every true proposition must have a ground or reason. Examples can be found in space and time.

Both thesis and antithesis in the antinomy accept an initially plausible but ultimately incoherent assumption that the sensible world as a whole existing in itself. Once we reject the assumption, the contradiction are resolved and replaced with contraries, and both of which are false. The demonstration that transcendental realism gives rise to the rejected assumption serves both of a refutation of transcendental realism and an indirect proof of transcendental idealism.

The First Antinomy

Thesis: world has a beginning in time and a limit in space Antithesis: world is infinite with respect to time and space.

Both of them are based on the common assumption that the world is either finite or infinite.

Thesis

The argument for thesis can be broken down into following:

  1. Assume the world has no beginning in time.
  2. It follows that for any given moment an eternity has passed
  3. This means an infinite series of events happened
  4. But by definition the infinity of a series can never be completed through successive synthesis
  5. Therefore it is contradictory.
  6. Consequently the assumption is wrong and the world must have a beginning in time.

Example common objection is that “From a subjective impossibility of apprehension he infers an objective impossibility of existence”, from Kemp Smith.

Another objection from G.E. Moore is that if the argument proves anything at all, it proves that time does not exist. He claims that Kant’s mistake was to infer falsely from the fact that the temporal series has one end that it cannot be infinite.

Kant explains the problem with the concept of totality in A433/B461. The problem is that the rule or procedure for thinking a totum syntheticum clashes with the rule or procedure for thinking an infinite quantity. The former demands precisely what the latter precludes: completability.

The response to Russell-Strawson and Moore-Bennett object is that a series that is infinite doesn’t mean that it can’t be completed in finite time, but that it can’t be completed at all. So the alternative is either (1). the series does not constitute a world or (2). there is a first moment. The argument presupposes the series does constitute a world so the conclusion is (2).

The real weakness of this argument is that conceiving the series of past events of the universe as constituting a totum syntheticum seems completely arbitrary. We can think of the series as infinite in the sense of being closed on one end.

Antithesis

  1. Assume the opposite: the world has a beginning in time
  2. The concept of a beginning presupposes a preceding time in which the thing that comes into being does not exist yet
  3. If one is to speak of the world coming into being, it is necessary to assume the existence of an empty time
  4. But it is impossible for anything to come into being in an empty time, because no point of such a time possesses, as compared to any other, a distinguishing condition of existence rather than non-existence.
  5. Therefore we can’t meaningfully speak of the “world itself” as having a beginning in time.
  6. Consequently, the world is infinite.

Step 6 involves a jump from the presumed meaninglessness of the claim that world has a beginning to the assertion that it is infinite. This is not correct, however, this follows from the common assumption that the world is either finite or infinite.

Why did the world begin when it did? To defend the finitistic position against step 4, Strawson divided it to two questions. As an internal question, it concerns the order of arrangement of the elements within the world. As an external question, it involves a reference to some external factor, which might explain why the world begin at t1 rather than t2. The operative assumption is that concern the world as a whole rules out the possibility of treating it as an external question, but not internal question. The reinterpretation of the question as internal does not meet the verificationist challenge in step 4.

Another strategy by Bennett attempts to show the denial of the world has a beginning does not follow from the stated promises. Bennett attempts to defend the coherence of the assumption that the first event occurred in the first time.

However, the notion of the first event is incoherent because the notion of event means it is a change and always presupposes the thing existed in a different state. Then we must say the first event is not an event but is still conceivable.

Even though the argument for the temporal position of the antithesis can be defended against some of the standard objections, it still falls short of the claims that Kant makes for it.

The Antinomy Conflict and Transcendental Idealism

In this section, we want to consider if we assume the cogency of the proofs in antinomy, if there is anything can be salvaged of Kant’s argument for idealism.

Assuming the Proofs are Sound

Kant claims since both thesis and antithesis in the first antinomy are rejected, and since both of them are assuming the world is a whole existing in itself, we should reject this assumption and claim that appearances are nothing outside of our representations. However, it seems perfectly possible to accept that the world is not a whole existing in itself without accepting the idealist result that all appearances are nothing outside of our representations.

The conclusion from the first antinomy can be the “world” does not refer.

Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism actually contains two implicit premises, (1). the antecedent is entailed by transcendental realism (2). transcendental realism and transcendental idealism are contradictory philosophical standpoints. We can take the second premise as given but not the first since it is not clear that transcendental realism entails the world is a whole existing in itself.

To explain the antinomical conflict Kant talks about the concept of condition and the conditioned. They can refer to both propositions and states of affairs. It is simply logical requirement that we should have adequate premises for any given conclusion, in other words the thought of conclusion presupposes premises. However, the regress from one state of affairs to another is “empirical synthesis”, the state of affairs can only be considered gegeben(given) insofar as they are empirically accessible. Consequently the intellectual imperative only has regulative function, that it requires us always to seek further conditions, but it does not entitle us to assume the totality of these conditions are given. Transcendental realism makes this assumption and generates antinomical conflict. The basic point is that anyone who regards appearances as things in themselves is committed, in virtue of intellectual imperative, to presuppose the presence of sufficient conditions for every given conditioned, and the absolute totality of conditions, the world, must exist. The world is presupposed to have a referent. The world in itself means a world conceived independent from the conditions of empirical synthesis. There would be nothing wrong here if the states of affairs the transcendental realists regards here are empirical and can not be referred to in abstraction from the empirical conditions.

Without Assuming the Proofs are Sound

The above argument assumes the proofs for thesis and antithesis are sound, but it can be reformulated to disregard the assumption. This is possible because transcendental idealism can follow directly from the proposition that “the world (the sum of all appearances) is a whole existing in itself”. All we need to do is find the grounds for this negation.

What we want to prove is the incoherence of the concept of “world”. Different from other ideas we discuss in the antinomy, the world is really a synthetic proposition, it asserts that there exists a higher-order empirical object, the world. The problem here is no that the world has no referent in experience. The incoherence is that it both purports to refer and explicitly exempts itself from the conditions under which reference is possible. The absolute totalities of conditions cannot be contained in the empirical synthesis.

The transcendentally realistic conception of the world as a whole exiting in itself is the product of this amphiboly, or “transcendental subreption” that consists in the ascription of “objective validity” to an Idea that serves merely as a rule. The cosmologists transforms an idea into a supposed representation of an object that is empirically given and therefore to be known according to the law of experience. sThe issue between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism does not arise in the empirical level. It arises only when transcendental realism endeavors to extend these “laws” beyond the limits of possible experience.

Transcendental Idealism

The appeal to the formal, a priori conditions of human experience and their characterization as “epistemic” are the defining features of Kant’s idealism. The position is idealistic because it grants these conditions the function of defining the meaning of determining what is “objective” for human mind.

Go back to Notes on Critique of Pure Reason