Is there anything absolutely necessary in the world (universe)?

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.

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[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.