Transcendental Objects

   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.