We can conceive something necessary
within a particular scenario, like when we define cause as a necessary relation between events which determines a temporal sequence of
those events within a particular conceptual frame, but can we conceive
consistently a necessary being in absolute terms? Necessary relations in
relative terms are introduced by definition as exomorphic conditions of the
system, and they work as definiens for other relations and objects. Such is the
Lebenswelt intuition of cause, which simply expresses a composition of
representations (o better, mappings in a neural space) according to a sequence.
However, as an absolute determination, the old bronze chain of Ananke reappears
as a transcendental object that grounds a full set of old hypostasis of the
universal law.
Kant’s arguments for the fourth antinomy
are equivalent to these:
A. There is something absolutely necessary in
the world, both[1]
as a part of it and as its cause.
1. Our experience of the world shows sequences
of alterations or changes in it.
2. Those alterations are causal sequences, thus
necessary relations.
3. Since without those alterations there would
be no world (for the concept of world implies the concept of time sequence)
those causal sequences as a whole are an absolutely necessary condition of the
world.
4. Such absolutely necessary condition is in the world (without it there is no
world at all), both as its cause and as part of it. It is obvious that the
causal sequence is part of the world, for an element of a time sequence (the
first one in this case) cannot be outside of time. Likewise, it is its cause.
∴ A is correct.
B. There is nothing absolutely necessary in
the world or outside the world as its cause.
1.Suppose that the
world itself is a necessary being.
2a. There exists an
absolutely necessary beginning of the series of alterations of the world. But
by the first antinomy (Did the universe ever begin?) we have proven that it does not make any sense to say that the
universe had a beginning (absolutely necessary or otherwise) or that it did not
have one, thus 1 must be rejected.
2b. The series is
without beginning. Nonsense by antinomy one.
3. The world cannot be a necessary being.
1’. Suppose that
there is a necessary being outside the world.
2’. In order to act
in the world it would have to be in the world and be a part of a time sequence.
As we have seen in antinomy three (Could we be spontaneous?) a free action cannot be considered causal at all, for
it cannot be inscribe in a sequence of necessary relations. In fact such
antinomy shows the transcendental origin of the concept of cause, and all its
problems.
3’. There is not a necessary being outside the
world that could be its cause.
∴ B is correct.
But A and B cannot be both correct.
The antinomy shows the transcendental (a priori) origin of the concept
of necessary, a concept that has been
extrapolated from its life scenario as a notion of restriction of an organism
within a particular context, to an absolute metaphysical restriction for the
whole universe, where it becomes not only fuzzy but contradictory with other
intuitions.
[1] I
have extended Kant’s disjunctive (...)entweder
als ihr Teil oder ihre Ursache(...) to
(...) beide als ihr Teil oder ihre Ursache (...), for outside
time causality is not causality at all. In fact, Kant reaches that conclusion
in the second part of the argumentation of the antithesis.
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