Hi cornelis! Jeepers, but I confess I’m rather rusty on Kant these days, not having read him in decades. But if memory serves, wasn’t his most famous antinomy phenomena/noumena? That’s an interesting split, which evidently is why he wrote two critiques of reason, “pure” and “practical.” There’s another antinomy! (Please do feel free to correct my mistakes of recollection or bad reasoning.)
But what is the standard of a “decent direction” for a resolution or reconciliation of the two, except in limited cases? (That is, how do we establish the standard by which we can judge cases as being “limited?”)
You wrote:
Anyhow, what is fascinating is that Kant's resolution of the cosmological antinomy greatly resembles the description of complimentarity in particle/wave duality of subatomic physics. In fact, both of these are similar to the classic way Thomas Aquinas resolves debates: both points whose are true in a restricted sense. This is exactly how Kant works his way around. He held that these jusitifiable but contradictory metaphysical claims are resolved by limiting the application of the claim. As Kant understood it, human knowledge is barred from knowing anything in itself, including nature. This means that claims about nature are limited.Here’s a detail about Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” which as already mentioned Bohr preferred to call the “indeterminacy principle.” He explained his preference this way: “uncertainty” says that we could know, but in the instant case we just happen not to know. That is, there is still a way for us to “find out.” Indeterminacy, on the other hand, according to Bohr, says that we can’t know.[Or as Bohr put it (paraphrasing), such claims (e.g., science) are not nature itself, but indications of man’s relation to nature, and thus are dependent on man.]
They are true in a restricted sense. His restrictions were described in terms of the conditions and categories of knowledge and reasoning. And in the case of subatomic physics, “particles and waves appear to be mutually exclusive entities, but that is only from the point of view of the observer.”
Recently I came across another interesting antinomy, this one not from quantum, but from classical physics, from Rod Swenson (Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, University of Connecticut):
The first and second laws of thermodynamics are not ordinary laws of physics. Because the first law, the law of energy conservation, in effect, reduces all real-world processes, it is thus a law on which all other laws depend. In more technical terms, it expresses the time-translation symmetry of the laws of physics themselves. With respect to the second law, Eddington (1929) has argued that it holds the supreme position among all the laws of nature because it not only governs the ordinary laws of physics but the first law as well. If the first law expresses the underlying symmetry principle of the natural world (that which remains the same) the second law expresses the broken symmetry (that which changes). It is with the second law that a basic nomological understanding of end-directedness, and time itself, the ordinary experience of then and now, of the flow of things, came into the world. The search for a conserved quantity and active principle is found as early as the work of Thales and the Milesian physicists (c. 630-524 B.C.) and is thus co-existent with the beginnings of recorded science, although it is Heraclitus (c. 536 B.C.) with his insistence on the relation between persistence and change who could well be argued to hold the top position among the earliest progenitors of the field that would become thermodynamics. Of modern scholars it was Leibniz who first argued that there must be something which is conserved (later the first law) and something which changes (later the second law).If that's a bona-fide antinomy, it appears to be one that does "resolve" -- at least at the "macrolevel" of the observable universe. Another piece of the puzzle here, seemingly not consistent with Kant's cosmological antinomies....
Recently I read a wonderful essay/post from you to another correspondent in which you wrote: “Kant loses the image of God in his transcendental reason.” Just as I imagine Hegel loses it in his dialectical science: He stands Plato’s metaxy on its head, lopping off the “divine pole” of human existential tension, leaving us with a reduction to “thought thinking itself” on the basis of an obscure text from Aristotle. I guess that's why I don’t read the Germans as much as I should. With the exception of Eric Voegelin, of course, who, following Plato, keeps the door open to the divine Nous “beyond” the universe. They all seem to have spawned antinomies. As noted, Kant's phenomena/noumena; for Hegel, it was thesis/antithesis, which finds its resolution in the synthesis of “thought thinking itself.” For Voegelin it was intentionalist consciousness/luminosity of consciousness in the exgesis of reality.
On yet another post you wrote: “Socrates made that all-important discovery about the character of his wisdom. He didn't call it socratic ignorance. He called it a kind of human wisdom. Socrates knew that his reason fell short of the divine, although you'll find commentators a thousand to one who vouch that Plato’s analysis of divine reason was human reason. Kant, for example, claims to finish what Plato began.”
My goodness, but didn’t Hegel do the same thing?
Whatever. Plato analyzed divine reason, or Nous; he seemed to indicate that human reason (nous) was syngenes, or “alike” to the divine reason. Both Kant and Hegel created “reductions” of Plato — certainly neither “completed Plato’s work.” It seems to me they simply changed the subject….
Well enuf for now: I’ve run on so long already! Thank you so much, cornelis, for your magnificent essay/posts! You always bring so much to the table — whenever you decide to extend your remarks.
For clarity of thought, although not related to this discussion more than tangentially, I would recommend one German philosopher, Josef Pieper, in his books on the seven virtues, cardinal and theological.
Perhaps his essay on prudence is somewhat relevant, since I have always thought that the change in the presumed definition of prudence from the Aristotelian-Thomist view to what is evident from what Machiavelli assumes in "The Prince" marks a significant turn in our understanding of what is "real" or "realistic"--or "prudent."
The Aristotle tradition would argue that prudence is the virtue or the habit needed to understand what is true or real.