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Reductionist views prefer one of the antinomies (or aspect) at the exclusion of the others. But a resolution is something else entirely. You want to call it an ultimate standard of logic or reason, but [what] warrants this move?

Jeepers, cornelis, I didn’t imagine I'd made such a move. Maybe I did; perhaps I wrote carelessly. I was critiquing the seeming illogic of the reductionist view of nature. Let's see....

Just to get us all on the same page here, an antinomy is “a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles.” Examples of antinomies: beauty and evil, or slavery and freedom.

On that basis, I just don’t see how the “reductionist view” can be an antinomy. It doesn’t say there is any “contradiction” of anything; it simply refuses to recognize anything outside of itself. This strikes me as being a blatantly incorrect inference.

We were speaking of complementaries in Niels Bohr’s sense of the word. I don’t think complementaries are antimonies, either. The most obvious example of a complementarity is the particle/wave duality of subatomic physics. The complementarity principle basically says that the observer is able to discern either one or the other, but not both at the same time. Particles and waves appear to be mutually exclusive entities, but that is only from the point of view of the observer, who should know that both descriptions are “true,” and both essential to the “complete description” of the system which is constituted by both particles and waves. In an experiment, the observer must choose which he would like to see, because you can’t see both at once, as Heisenberg pointed out – i.e., his uncertainty principle (Bohr preferred to call it the indeterminacy principle), which is based on the recognition that you can’t know both the position and the velocity of a subatomic particle at the same time. If your experiment calls for viewing the “particle aspect,” the wave aspect utterly falls away from view, and vice versa. But it is “still there.”

So complementarity essentially refers to a paradox in epistemology. The observer cannot see or know the two entities “together”; but nature is constituted by both. Indeed, it is a superposition of both: This is the “higher resolution” I was referring to. The human mind cannot directly see this resolution (because man is utterly involved in it and so can’t find a point “outside” from which to view it?); but it’s already a given in nature. And to me, nature and the universe are evidently “ordered” at a “higher” principal level that we do not directly discern (e.g., physical laws and/or mathematical axioms), though we do see the “lawful results” in the created world. And so I am led to the idea of a Logos. Without a rational standard, nature could only be a random, accidental development: nothing distinct or definite could ever come to be or persist in time.

By analogy, I think an argument can be made that the human knowledge domain involves complementariness, sometimes referred to as the “Cartesian split.” On the one side of the divide are the natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc.); on the other, the humanities, or “sciences of the spirit” (e.g., philosophy, theology, the arts, history, etc.). In recent times it has become fashionable to say that the natural sciences are “exact” and “objective,” while the humanities are inexact and “subjective,” and therefore of inferior value (if they have any real value at all and aren’t merely exercises in superstition referring to illusory objects). Fans of this presupposition find reason to believe that the universe is in fact reducible to the matter-only, monist proposition.

Well, that’s enuf for now. Sorry for not replying sooner. I’ve been a little distracted by the election lately. Now that it’s over, and irrationality seems to have triumphed big-time, it’s time to move on….

Thanks so much for writing, cornelis!

The word antinomy came into play when Kant used them to direct our attention to justifiable but contradictory metaphysical claims--for example, that the world has a beginning in time and that the world is eternal in time. Such contradictions can be variously explained, resolved, or dismissed. Kant's resolution was, I think, headed in a decent direction (for particular kinds of oppositions).

There are may other kinds of oppositions that may or may not resemble contradictory metaphysical claims. They too will be variously explained, resolved, or dismissed. Pythagoreans struggled over the odd and even, Zeno is famous for his paradoxes, Empedocles suggested Love and Strife, Socrates describes pain and pleasure as Janus-headed in the Phaedo, in the Parmenides we find the problem of the one and the many, Aristotle discusses the principle of noncontradiction, he also perceives the interplay of stasis and kinesis, other dualistic myths abound outside of ancient Greece, Christ our Lord teaches life through death, and so on. Hot and cold, slavery and freedom, and other kinds of opposites also show their own unique relations.

With all of these classified in some reasonable order we might strictly reserve a particular term such that antinomy is used only to speak of contradictory metaphysical claims and contradiction of formal logical oppositions. A term like paradox may now be unacceptable in cases, depending on someone's social preferences. Habits of thought often shift according to the convenience of power or advantage. Take your pick, there are a whole lot of terms that do the trick:contrariety, antitheses, in/congruity, in/consistency, inversion, dilemma, dis/parity, hetero/homogeneity, in/equality. There may be good reason to reserve the term complimentarity for observations made about physical nature.

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. 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."

Thanks for your reploy, bb. More later, time for choir.