Kant talks about transcendental ideas as
cognitions that are taken beyond any possible experience, i.e. beyond the
boundaries of empirical knowledge, though still in connection with it. Those
ideas are basic epistemological objects of the philosophical traditions of the
world (not only Western) which express fundamental ways of the development of
the human thinking. Kant noticed that precisely by their distance from
experience they become problematic and shaky in their epistemological content.
He proved that, in fact, when trying to prove them logically, they produce
antinomies.
I understand those transcendental objects as conceptual
constructions of the Überlebenswelt (the reflexive and formalized knowledge) which
use as building blocks intuitions from the Lebenswelt (the knowledge of
everyday life) containing at least one undefined concept (exomorphism). An
example would be the concept of “implication”, a rather simple and basic
intuition which in our everyday life means a relation between two things, one
following the other which ultimately points out to a basic intuition of
sequence, i.e. of time. We could hardly go in our explanations beyond such
intuitional sequence, and in this sense, we say that is an exomorphism, a
non-definable. Logic, as an Überleneswelt construction takes that concept as
undefined and uses it to construct its scientific edifice.
The first two Kantian antinomies use as basic
objects two pairs of opposites: limited/unlimited and simple/complex. They
correspond to basic intuitions of our thinking in everyday life. They are two
of the opposites discussed by the Pythagorean School, the second one expressed
in its equivalent form of the opposition one/many. They both work as basic
determinations of life processes but when we project them beyond organic life
we are just playing with old metaphysics.
The other two antinomies deal with another
opposition necessity/freedom and then with the idea of a necessary referent
conceived as a chain of conditions which proceed from the unconditioned. The
old chain of Ananke is an old philosophical monster which has its roots deeply
grounded in our cognitive processes. Modern physics has finished with these ways of thinking although it is difficult to stop its inertia when thinking
cosmological questions. On the other hand, the notion of freedom does not
correspond to the same cognitive level, for it is a moral concept that cannot
be put at the level of "necessity". Freedom is an ideal that has its
grounds in our capacity for symbolical thinking. The n-aryzed symbolic worlds
advance from the ludic buffers of thinking to a demand of autonomy for the full
emotional world, a demand of the process of continuous rationality. It is
linked to the development of the lyrical citizen.
